Gekkō’s Miscellaney
About This Series
Ogata Gekko's Gekko's Miscellany (Gekko zuihitsu) is among the artist's best-known publishing projects, an album-format cycle issued in installments by Sasaki Toyokichi between 1887 and the mid-1890s and gathering the broad sweep of his subject range under the rubric of zuihitsu, the classical Japanese genre of the occasional essay or sketchbook in which a writer assembles observations as they arise. The transfer of that literary rubric into print form had been productively used in nineteenth-century ukiyo-e to license a designer's eclectic gathering of disparate subjects, and Gekko's project assembles legendary and historical figures, scenes from no and kabuki, bijin and seasonal landscape, and incidents from the Sino-Japanese conflict of 1894-1895 into a unified cycle that registers the breadth of his Meiji-era practice. Gekko had emerged in the 1880s as one of the leading nihonga-trained ukiyo-e designers, eclectic in style and largely self-taught, and his collaboration with Sasaki Toyokichi placed him among the more ambitious print publishers of the early-Meiji decade who sought to extend the woodblock medium into deluxe album form for a domestic intelligentsia and an emerging Western collecting market. The prints in Gekko zuihitsu 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 what the post-Edo print could do in its most ambitious technical register. Impressions are preserved in the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, the British Museum, the Tokyo National Museum, and the Art Institute of Chicago, where the series figures in the standard cataloguing of Meiji-era print as one of the central documents of Gekko's mature production.
Prints in This Series (2)
Frequently Asked Questions
Ogata Gekko's Gekko's Miscellany (Gekko zuihitsu) is among the artist's best-known publishing projects, an album-format cycle issued in installments by Sasaki Toyokichi between 1887 and the mid-1890s and gathering the broad sweep of his subject range under the rubric of zuihitsu, the classical Japanese genre of the occasional essay or sketchbook in which a writer assembles observations as they arise. The transfer of that literary rubric into print form had been productively used in nineteenth-century ukiyo-e to license a designer's eclectic gathering of disparate subjects, and Gekko's project assembles legendary and historical figures, scenes from no and kabuki, bijin and seasonal landscape, and incidents from the Sino-Japanese conflict of 1894-1895 into a unified cycle that registers the breadth of his Meiji-era practice. Gekko had emerged in the 1880s as one of the leading nihonga-trained ukiyo-e designers, eclectic in style and largely self-taught, and his collaboration with Sasaki Toyokichi placed him among the more ambitious print publishers of the early-Meiji decade who sought to extend the woodblock medium into deluxe album form for a domestic intelligentsia and an emerging Western collecting market. The prints in Gekko zuihitsu 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 what the post-Edo print could do in its most ambitious technical register. Impressions are preserved in the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, the British Museum, the Tokyo National Museum, and the Art Institute of Chicago, where the series figures in the standard cataloguing of Meiji-era print as one of the central documents of Gekko's mature production.
The Gekkō’s Miscellaney series contains 2 prints, created by Ogata Gekko.
The Gekkō’s Miscellaney series was created by Ogata Gekko (尾形月耕).
We currently have 2 of 2 known prints from the Gekkō’s Miscellaney series indexed in our collection. Browse them all on this page.
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