Twenty-Four Hours at Shinyanagi (Shinyanagi nijuyoji)

Tsukioka Yoshitoshi's "Twenty-Four Hours at Shinyanagi" (Shinyanagi nijuyoji) belongs to the cluster of late bijin-ga series in which the artist documented the hours of life in Tokyo's licensed quarters and geisha districts during the early Meiji era. The series follows the same diaristic conceit as the better-known "Twenty-Four Hours in Shinbashi and Yanagibashi" (Shinbashi Yanagibashi nijuyoji), tracking a single day in a hanamachi from morning toilette through the late hours of the evening, with each sheet labelled by the hour and a brief vignette of the women of the quarter at their daily tasks. Shinyanagi was one of the smaller and less prestigious of the Tokyo geisha districts that emerged in the wake of the Meiji reforms, and Yoshitoshi's choice to commemorate it in print form is consistent with his broader late-period interest in the female social types of contemporary Tokyo, observed with the same documentary attention he gave to the historical and supernatural subjects of his major cycles. Published in the 1880s, in the same decade as his "Thirty-two Aspects of Customs and Manners" (Fuzoku sanjuniso) and "Thirty-Six New Forms of Ghosts" (Shinkei sanjurokkaisen), the Shinyanagi sheets share the careful psychological characterization, full-figure bijin compositions and increasingly Westernized print colouring that distinguish Yoshitoshi's late bijin-ga from the earlier Edo tradition of pure courtesan portraiture. The complete series appears to have run to twelve or twenty-four sheets, in line with the conceit of the hours of the day, but it has never enjoyed the catalogue attention given to Yoshitoshi's major projects and surviving examples are scarce in Western collections, with most known impressions held in Japanese museums and in the comprehensive Yoshitoshi holdings of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and the British Museum. The series stands as one of Yoshitoshi's last sustained engagements with the bijin-ga tradition before his death in 1892, and is most readily understood in dialogue with his closely related Shinbashi and Yanagibashi cycle of the same decade.

The Twenty-Four Hours at Shinyanagi (Shinyanagi nijuyoji) series contains 1 prints, created by Tsukioka Yoshitoshi.

The Twenty-Four Hours at Shinyanagi (Shinyanagi nijuyoji) series was created by Tsukioka Yoshitoshi (月岡芳年).

We currently have 1 of 1 known prints from the Twenty-Four Hours at Shinyanagi (Shinyanagi nijuyoji) series indexed in our collection. Browse them all on this page.