Yamato jinbutsu gafu (Picture-album of the Natives of Yamato) — Genre Scenes of Kyoto and Osaka

This plate from the Yamato jinbutsu gafu (倭人物画譜, Picture-album of the Natives of Yamato), held by the British Museum, presents one of the album's many genre scenes of life in Kyoto and Osaka. The three-volume set, first published in Kyoto in 1799-1800 and reprinted across the early nineteenth century, was Yamaguchi Soken's most influential project as an ehon designer, surveying the figures and street scenes of contemporary urban Japan with the descriptive line that Maruyama Ōkyo's pupils had developed for shasei (sketching from life). The album's genre scenes — gatherings around teahouses, evening cool at the Kamo and Yodo rivers, festival processions, marketplace exchanges, parties of friends on outings — function both as observed records of late Kansei urban life and as compositional models for younger painters working in the Shijō tradition. The British Museum's copy preserves the album as a black-and-white woodblock book carrying Soken's signature and seal at the colophon. As one of the most widely diffused Kyoto picture-albums of its generation, the Yamato jinbutsu gafu helped to define what figure subjects from contemporary Japan looked like for nineteenth-century Kyoto and Osaka painters, and its plates remained in circulation as model images well into the Meiji period.