Drawings for Pleasure by Kyōsai
About This Series
Kawanabe Kyosai's "Drawings for Pleasure by Kyosai" (Kyosai rakuga, or in some catalogues Kyosai manga) belongs to the tradition of the printed sketchbook (e-bon) in which an artist gathered loose-brushed studies, comic inventions and observational drawings into a portable volume for the popular market. The format had been canonized in ukiyo-e by Hokusai's fifteen-volume "Hokusai manga" of 1814-1878, and Kyosai's contribution to the genre is most fruitfully read in dialogue with that precedent: like Hokusai, he used the rakuga format to display the entire range of his draftsmanship, from carefully observed birds and animals through demons and deities to comic vignettes of contemporary Tokyo street life. The brushwork is characteristically rapid and confident, with passages that demonstrate his Kano training in the controlled inflection of line alongside others that exploit the looser, freer mode of his Utagawa-school early years and his sake-fueled public demonstrations. Publication of the rakuga and manga volumes appears to have been spread across the 1860s and 1870s and issued in multiple volumes by the popular Tokyo book publishers, with Iseya Kanekichi and Hayakawa Genjiro among the houses associated with Kyosai's printed sketch material; precise volume-by-volume attributions vary between Western and Japanese cataloguing. The work belongs to the same printed corpus as the "Kyosai hyakuzu" and the "Kyosai hyakkyo" and constitutes one of the principal channels by which Kyosai's drawing practice reached the late-Meiji audience and, through the Conder collection, the early Western connoisseurship of Japanese print culture. Examples are held in the British Museum, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and the Kyosai Kinenkan in Warabi, where the artist's late-career engagement with the printed sketchbook is most fully documented.
Prints in This Series (1)
Frequently Asked Questions
Kawanabe Kyosai's "Drawings for Pleasure by Kyosai" (Kyosai rakuga, or in some catalogues Kyosai manga) belongs to the tradition of the printed sketchbook (e-bon) in which an artist gathered loose-brushed studies, comic inventions and observational drawings into a portable volume for the popular market. The format had been canonized in ukiyo-e by Hokusai's fifteen-volume "Hokusai manga" of 1814-1878, and Kyosai's contribution to the genre is most fruitfully read in dialogue with that precedent: like Hokusai, he used the rakuga format to display the entire range of his draftsmanship, from carefully observed birds and animals through demons and deities to comic vignettes of contemporary Tokyo street life. The brushwork is characteristically rapid and confident, with passages that demonstrate his Kano training in the controlled inflection of line alongside others that exploit the looser, freer mode of his Utagawa-school early years and his sake-fueled public demonstrations. Publication of the rakuga and manga volumes appears to have been spread across the 1860s and 1870s and issued in multiple volumes by the popular Tokyo book publishers, with Iseya Kanekichi and Hayakawa Genjiro among the houses associated with Kyosai's printed sketch material; precise volume-by-volume attributions vary between Western and Japanese cataloguing. The work belongs to the same printed corpus as the "Kyosai hyakuzu" and the "Kyosai hyakkyo" and constitutes one of the principal channels by which Kyosai's drawing practice reached the late-Meiji audience and, through the Conder collection, the early Western connoisseurship of Japanese print culture. Examples are held in the British Museum, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and the Kyosai Kinenkan in Warabi, where the artist's late-career engagement with the printed sketchbook is most fully documented.
The Drawings for Pleasure by Kyōsai series contains 1 prints, created by Kawanabe Kyosai.
The Drawings for Pleasure by Kyōsai series was created by Kawanabe Kyosai (河鍋暁斎).
We currently have 1 of 1 known prints from the Drawings for Pleasure by Kyōsai series indexed in our collection. Browse them all on this page.
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