Famous Sights of Japan
About This Series
Famous Sights of Japan (Nihon meisho zue or a closely related title) belongs to the meisho tradition that runs through Kobayashi Kiyochika's career from his first Tokyo views of the late 1870s onward, and that the artist extended in his mature work into a national rather than purely metropolitan survey of celebrated places. Kiyochika had launched his print career in 1876 with the Tokyo Famous Places (Tokyo meisho zue) issued by Matsuki Heikichi, the cycle of atmospheric urban views drawing on Western lithography and photography that established his reputation as the principal innovator of Meiji landscape and that came to be known as kosen-ga, or light-ray pictures. The Famous Sights of Japan series extends that mode of observation beyond the new capital to the wider geography of the country, presenting celebrated landscape, coastal and pilgrimage sites in the carefully observed, atmospherically modeled manner that distinguishes Kiyochika's contribution to the late-nineteenth-century meisho tradition. The compositions characteristically combine a foreground of figures or local detail with a middle ground of architecture or vegetation and a distant atmospheric register, the whole rendered in the tonal gradations of color and the firm Western-influenced perspective that the artist had absorbed from imported visual materials. The series belongs to a wider Meiji project of consolidating the national meisho canon for an audience whose mobility was being transformed by the new rail network, and Kiyochika's contribution is among the most pictorially accomplished of these surveys. Impressions are held in the Kiyochika collections of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, the British Museum, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Sackler in Washington and the Edo-Tokyo Museum, and the series is documented in Henry Smith's and Lawrence Bickford's standard catalogues of the artist.
Prints in This Series (10)
Frequently Asked Questions
Famous Sights of Japan (Nihon meisho zue or a closely related title) belongs to the meisho tradition that runs through Kobayashi Kiyochika's career from his first Tokyo views of the late 1870s onward, and that the artist extended in his mature work into a national rather than purely metropolitan survey of celebrated places. Kiyochika had launched his print career in 1876 with the Tokyo Famous Places (Tokyo meisho zue) issued by Matsuki Heikichi, the cycle of atmospheric urban views drawing on Western lithography and photography that established his reputation as the principal innovator of Meiji landscape and that came to be known as kosen-ga, or light-ray pictures. The Famous Sights of Japan series extends that mode of observation beyond the new capital to the wider geography of the country, presenting celebrated landscape, coastal and pilgrimage sites in the carefully observed, atmospherically modeled manner that distinguishes Kiyochika's contribution to the late-nineteenth-century meisho tradition. The compositions characteristically combine a foreground of figures or local detail with a middle ground of architecture or vegetation and a distant atmospheric register, the whole rendered in the tonal gradations of color and the firm Western-influenced perspective that the artist had absorbed from imported visual materials. The series belongs to a wider Meiji project of consolidating the national meisho canon for an audience whose mobility was being transformed by the new rail network, and Kiyochika's contribution is among the most pictorially accomplished of these surveys. Impressions are held in the Kiyochika collections of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, the British Museum, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Sackler in Washington and the Edo-Tokyo Museum, and the series is documented in Henry Smith's and Lawrence Bickford's standard catalogues of the artist.
The Famous Sights of Japan series contains 7 prints, created by Kobayashi Kiyochika.
The Famous Sights of Japan series was created by Kobayashi Kiyochika (小林清親).
We currently have 10 of 7 known prints from the Famous Sights of Japan series indexed in our collection. Browse them all on this page.
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