Sketches by Gekkô
About This Series
Ogata Gekko's Sketches by Gekko (Gekko sogo or a closely related title) belongs to the album-format publications through which the artist gathered his looser observational drawings into print form for the domestic intelligentsia and the export market of the Meiji decades. The title's framing of the cycle as sketches situates the project within the late-nineteenth-century interest in the artist's preparatory and informal hand, an interest that grew up alongside the new exhibition culture and the emergence of nihonga as a self-conscious modern category and that produced parallel album collections by contemporaries including Kawanabe Kyosai and Kobayashi Eitaku. Gekko had been formed in the 1870s and 1880s as a largely self-taught designer combining nihonga compositional habits with the ukiyo-e print idiom, and his sketch albums register the breadth of his observational practice across legendary, historical, theatrical, bijin, landscape, and topical subjects. The series is generally placed in the late 1880s and 1890s during the most productive phase of his collaboration with the leading Meiji publishers, and each sheet is issued with the production values characteristic of the deluxe album print of the period, employing graduated color and the selective registration of fine line that translates the look of the sketchbook into woodblock. The series can be read simultaneously as a survey of his subject range and as a deliberate showcase of his draftsmanship, designed to demonstrate the continuity between the nihonga sketch tradition and the modern print medium for which he was one of the most accomplished Meiji practitioners. Impressions are preserved in the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, the British Museum, and the Tokyo National Museum, where the album figures in the standard cataloguing of his mature production.
Prints in This Series (2)
Frequently Asked Questions
Ogata Gekko's Sketches by Gekko (Gekko sogo or a closely related title) belongs to the album-format publications through which the artist gathered his looser observational drawings into print form for the domestic intelligentsia and the export market of the Meiji decades. The title's framing of the cycle as sketches situates the project within the late-nineteenth-century interest in the artist's preparatory and informal hand, an interest that grew up alongside the new exhibition culture and the emergence of nihonga as a self-conscious modern category and that produced parallel album collections by contemporaries including Kawanabe Kyosai and Kobayashi Eitaku. Gekko had been formed in the 1870s and 1880s as a largely self-taught designer combining nihonga compositional habits with the ukiyo-e print idiom, and his sketch albums register the breadth of his observational practice across legendary, historical, theatrical, bijin, landscape, and topical subjects. The series is generally placed in the late 1880s and 1890s during the most productive phase of his collaboration with the leading Meiji publishers, and each sheet is issued with the production values characteristic of the deluxe album print of the period, employing graduated color and the selective registration of fine line that translates the look of the sketchbook into woodblock. The series can be read simultaneously as a survey of his subject range and as a deliberate showcase of his draftsmanship, designed to demonstrate the continuity between the nihonga sketch tradition and the modern print medium for which he was one of the most accomplished Meiji practitioners. Impressions are preserved in the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, the British Museum, and the Tokyo National Museum, where the album figures in the standard cataloguing of his mature production.
The Sketches by Gekkô series contains 1 prints, created by Ogata Gekko.
The Sketches by Gekkô series was created by Ogata Gekko (尾形月耕).
We currently have 2 of 1 known prints from the Sketches by Gekkô series indexed in our collection. Browse them all on this page.
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