Yamato jinbutsu gafu (Picture-album of the Natives of Yamato), First Edition

The 1799 first edition of the Yamato jinbutsu gafu (倭人物画譜) is the original Kansei 11 publication of Yamaguchi Soken's foundational figure album, the project that launched his career as a designer of printed ehon. The British Museum's copy preserves the album as a woodblock-printed book in the standard small Kyoto ehon format, with Soken's signature and seal at the colophon and a publisher's notice placing production in late-Kansei Kyoto. The plates survey the figures of contemporary Japan as observed by a Maruyama-school pupil trained in shasei (sketching from life): Kyoto women in seasonal dress, traveling pilgrims, market vendors, monks, performers, and the small groups of children, dogs, and companions that animate Soken's compositions. The drawing combines the descriptive line that Ōkyo had institutionalized in the 1770s and 1780s with the looser, more painterly contour that Matsumura Goshun was developing in the parallel Shijō workshop, producing a hybrid style that became influential on Kyoto and Osaka figure painting throughout the nineteenth century. The 1799 first edition was rapidly succeeded by an 1800 reprint and by the 1804 second series, but the first edition retains its priority as the original version of the album.