One Hundred Pictures by Kyôsai
About This Series
Kawanabe Kyosai's "One Hundred Pictures by Kyosai" (Kyosai hyakuzu) is the most substantial of the encyclopedic sketch albums that the artist published during his late career and one of the principal vehicles by which his name reached a broad readership in the closing decades of the nineteenth century. The hyakuzu format, a numbered cycle of one hundred designs gathered into a multi-volume e-bon, had a long pedigree in Edo-period print culture, providing artists with a structured occasion for surveying the entire range of their subject matter, and Kyosai used it to demonstrate the encyclopedic reach of a brush trained in both the Utagawa workshop of his early years and the Kano studio in which he completed his formal painting education. The volumes contain a panoramic catalogue of his characteristic subjects: demons, deities and ghosts of Buddhist and folk tradition; warriors of the Genpei and Sengoku cycles; courtesans, monks and street performers; the great roster of birds, animals and insects on which his observational drawing was founded; and the comic, grotesque and frankly satirical inventions for which his name became a byword in Meiji popular print culture. Publication appears to have been spread across the 1860s and early Meiji period, with the most widely circulated impressions issued in the 1860s and 1870s, and the work is consistently catalogued under the dual generic identification of e-bon and hyakuzu in the standard Kyosai literature. The series is the natural counterpart to his earlier "Kyosai gadan" treatise on painting and to the sketchbooks that Josiah Conder published in his "Paintings and Studies by Kawanabe Kyosai" of 1911, and it stands as the most accessible introduction to the breadth of his pictorial repertoire. Substantial sets are held by the British Museum, principally through the Conder bequest, by the Kyosai Kinenkan in Warabi, by the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and by the major Japanese university libraries, and the Hyakuzu remains the work in which the encyclopedic ambition of his late practice is most fully realized.
Prints in This Series (96)
Frequently Asked Questions
Kawanabe Kyosai's "One Hundred Pictures by Kyosai" (Kyosai hyakuzu) is the most substantial of the encyclopedic sketch albums that the artist published during his late career and one of the principal vehicles by which his name reached a broad readership in the closing decades of the nineteenth century. The hyakuzu format, a numbered cycle of one hundred designs gathered into a multi-volume e-bon, had a long pedigree in Edo-period print culture, providing artists with a structured occasion for surveying the entire range of their subject matter, and Kyosai used it to demonstrate the encyclopedic reach of a brush trained in both the Utagawa workshop of his early years and the Kano studio in which he completed his formal painting education. The volumes contain a panoramic catalogue of his characteristic subjects: demons, deities and ghosts of Buddhist and folk tradition; warriors of the Genpei and Sengoku cycles; courtesans, monks and street performers; the great roster of birds, animals and insects on which his observational drawing was founded; and the comic, grotesque and frankly satirical inventions for which his name became a byword in Meiji popular print culture. Publication appears to have been spread across the 1860s and early Meiji period, with the most widely circulated impressions issued in the 1860s and 1870s, and the work is consistently catalogued under the dual generic identification of e-bon and hyakuzu in the standard Kyosai literature. The series is the natural counterpart to his earlier "Kyosai gadan" treatise on painting and to the sketchbooks that Josiah Conder published in his "Paintings and Studies by Kawanabe Kyosai" of 1911, and it stands as the most accessible introduction to the breadth of his pictorial repertoire. Substantial sets are held by the British Museum, principally through the Conder bequest, by the Kyosai Kinenkan in Warabi, by the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and by the major Japanese university libraries, and the Hyakuzu remains the work in which the encyclopedic ambition of his late practice is most fully realized.
The One Hundred Pictures by Kyôsai series contains 5 prints, created by Kawanabe Kyosai.
The One Hundred Pictures by Kyôsai series was created by Kawanabe Kyosai (河鍋暁斎).
We currently have 96 of 5 known prints from the One Hundred Pictures by Kyôsai series indexed in our collection. Browse them all on this page.
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