Gekkô Zuihitsu
About This Series
Ogata Gekko's Gekko Zuihitsu, recorded here under the alternative slug form of the title also catalogued as Gekko's Miscellany, is the artist's central album-format publication of the late 1880s and 1890s, issued in installments by Sasaki Toyokichi and gathering the breadth of his subject range under the literary rubric of zuihitsu, the classical Japanese genre of the occasional essay or sketchbook. The conceit had been productively used in nineteenth-century ukiyo-e to license a designer's eclectic assembly of disparate subjects under a single binding, and Gekko's cycle accordingly gathers legendary and historical figures, scenes from no and kabuki, bijin and seasonal landscape, and incidents from the contemporary Meiji moment including the Sino-Japanese war into a unified album that registers the eclecticism of his mature practice. Gekko had emerged in the 1880s as one of the leading nihonga-trained ukiyo-e designers, largely self-taught and synthesizing the older Edo print tradition with the new compositional habits of the post-Restoration Japanese painting world, and his collaboration with Sasaki Toyokichi placed him among the more ambitious of the early-Meiji print publishers who sought to extend the woodblock into deluxe album form for a domestic intelligentsia and an emerging Western collecting market. The prints are issued in oban tate-e or yoko-e format with elaborate color and frequent use of metallic pigments and embossing, the production values pitched well above the standard commercial sheet, and each plate carries a title cartouche identifying its subject. The series operates simultaneously as a survey of the late-nineteenth-century Japanese subject repertory and as a demonstration of the technical resources of the post-Edo print at its most ambitious. The duplication of this entry alongside the alternative spelling reflects the variant orthographies under which Meiji titles have been recorded in modern English cataloguing, and impressions are preserved in the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, the British Museum, and the Tokyo National Museum.
Prints in This Series (2)
Frequently Asked Questions
Ogata Gekko's Gekko Zuihitsu, recorded here under the alternative slug form of the title also catalogued as Gekko's Miscellany, is the artist's central album-format publication of the late 1880s and 1890s, issued in installments by Sasaki Toyokichi and gathering the breadth of his subject range under the literary rubric of zuihitsu, the classical Japanese genre of the occasional essay or sketchbook. The conceit had been productively used in nineteenth-century ukiyo-e to license a designer's eclectic assembly of disparate subjects under a single binding, and Gekko's cycle accordingly gathers legendary and historical figures, scenes from no and kabuki, bijin and seasonal landscape, and incidents from the contemporary Meiji moment including the Sino-Japanese war into a unified album that registers the eclecticism of his mature practice. Gekko had emerged in the 1880s as one of the leading nihonga-trained ukiyo-e designers, largely self-taught and synthesizing the older Edo print tradition with the new compositional habits of the post-Restoration Japanese painting world, and his collaboration with Sasaki Toyokichi placed him among the more ambitious of the early-Meiji print publishers who sought to extend the woodblock into deluxe album form for a domestic intelligentsia and an emerging Western collecting market. The prints are issued in oban tate-e or yoko-e format with elaborate color and frequent use of metallic pigments and embossing, the production values pitched well above the standard commercial sheet, and each plate carries a title cartouche identifying its subject. The series operates simultaneously as a survey of the late-nineteenth-century Japanese subject repertory and as a demonstration of the technical resources of the post-Edo print at its most ambitious. The duplication of this entry alongside the alternative spelling reflects the variant orthographies under which Meiji titles have been recorded in modern English cataloguing, and impressions are preserved in the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, the British Museum, and the Tokyo National Museum.
The Gekkô Zuihitsu series contains 1 prints, created by Ogata Gekko.
The Gekkô Zuihitsu series was created by Ogata Gekko (尾形月耕).
We currently have 2 of 1 known prints from the Gekkô Zuihitsu series indexed in our collection. Browse them all on this page.
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