People of Yamato (Japan) Picture Album (Yamato jinbutsu gafu) Second series 倭人物画譜 後編

People of Yamato (Japan) Picture Album (Yamato jinbutsu gafu) Second Series (倭人物画譜 後編), dated 1804, is the follow-up volume to Yamaguchi Soken's (山口素絢, 1759-1818) 1800 album of the same title, held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art (accession recorded at https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/78717). The continuation testifies to the success of the first volume and to the publishing economics of the late-Edo printed picture album (gafu), in which a popular initial release could be extended into successive series. Soken was a leading pupil of Maruyama Ōkyo (1733-1795), the Kyoto painter who founded the Maruyama school by combining Kano-derived classical training with the observational naturalism Ōkyo had absorbed through Western pictorial models reaching Japan via the Dutch trade and through Chinese painting manuals. Ōkyo's lineage produced a generation of accomplished figure and bird-and-flower painters of whom Soken was among the most refined, particularly in figural subjects. By the 1804 date Soken was working in mature independent practice within the broad Maruyama orbit, and the second series of the Yamato jinbutsu gafu offered him an opportunity to extend the figural repertoire of the earlier volume — likely to a wider range of social types, occasions, and seasonal subjects drawn from the native Japanese world. The printed format, with its careful tonal woodblock reproduction of brushwork, allowed the album to function as both a collectible object for cultivated readers and an instructional reference for younger painters working in or adjacent to the Maruyama tradition.