This rare triptych by Yoshikazu shows the first Battle of Uji, 1180.
Oddly, I can't find this design recorded in any Western or Japanese source — the only references I turned up were Russian. Curious if anyone here has seen it.
The Mitate Tai Zukushi (Representations of Desires, also translated A Collection of Desires) is a set of some twenty bijin-ga published in remarkably rapid succession over barely two months in 1877–78 by Inoue Shigehei. Each sheet shows an unnamed woman in a domestic moment whose pose and surroundings illustrate a particular wish — from "I want to go to sleep" and "I want another drink" to "I want to go abroad." Every title hinges on a play with the word tai, and the accompanying texts — by the popular writer Takabatake Ransen.
The series is best understood as an important precursor to Yoshitoshi's celebrated late bijin masterwork, Fūzoku Sanjūnisō (Thirty-Two Aspects of Customs and Manners, 1888), which it anticipates by a full decade. The intimate half-length framing, the close attention to a woman's passing mood, and the wit of the conceit are all already present here, in the middle of the artist's career, before the great supernatural and historical series for which he is best known.
Prints from this series retail for $400–800 depending on condition and subject. While not the cheapest bijin-ga, I find these somewhat more visually appealing than classic Kunichika Meiji bijin-ga. There is also notable depth in the carving and pigment using, and burnishing black is present on many designs. By Yoshitoshi's quality standards, these prints are definitely underpriced.
This series ranks among the most technically demanding chūban prints of the Edo period. Each print required over eight different woodblocks with precise registration and elaborate bokashi techniques. But these are not merely visually complex works of art—many of these prints hold genuine historical significance. It's like collecting pieces of a puzzle of Japanese history! The texts on the reverse and the characters depicted offer insights into one of Japan's most turbulent eras. With 100 prints in the complete series, collecting them is a true pleasure—each print tells the story of a different hero.
These prints are very affordable and are a perfect entry into the Musha-e genre.
Bijin Hana Kurabe ("Beauties Compared to Flowers") is one of the great unsung series of late Meiji printmaking. Comprising 24 ōban designs and issued over more than a decade between 1887 and 1899 by Matsuki Heikichi (Daikokuya) and Takekawa Risaburō, each print pairs a beautiful woman with a specific flower or flowering plant: plum, cherry, iris, chrysanthemum, peony, wisteria, camellia, willow. The standard Japanese convention of mitate (parallel comparison) governs the conceit, but Gekkō pushes the form into territory that no earlier ukiyo-e bijin artist had explored.
What sets the series apart from every contemporary bijin-ga project of the 1880s and 1890s is its extraordinary restraint. The decade was dominated, in print terms, by the brilliant aniline-red triptychs of Chikanobu, Kunichika, and their circle — vivid, theatrical, saturated with the new imported European pigments. Gekkō chose the muted palette of pale washi: warm creams, soft greys, dove-coloured shadows, occasional accents of indigo or ochre, allowing the natural tone of the paper itself to function as a colour in the design. The technical production matches the visual ambition: extensive bokashi gradation in skies and grounds, delicate karazuri (blind printing) for textural relief, and a refined palette of mineral colours rather than the cheaper aniline dyes.
The result is a body of work that feels much closer in spirit to the shin-hanga movement of the 1910s and 1920s — to artists like Shinsui, Goyō, and Hashiguchi — than to the late Edo ukiyo-e of Gekkō's own generation.
Everyone knows Hiroshige's Tōkaidō. Most collectors know Hokusai's Fuji series. Both are red-hot on today's market — and priced accordingly. A decent impression of a Hiroshige Hōeidō station will run you well into four figures, and Hokusai's Thirty-six Views? Don't even ask.
But this Bijin Tōkaidō of the 1830s — designed by the single most commercially successful artist in all of Edo — is almost unknown in the West. And that's exactly what makes it interesting.
Utagawa Kunisada's Tōkaidō Gojūsan Tsugi no Uchi, the so-called "Bijin Tōkaidō," is a 56-design chūban series published by Sanoya Kihei around 1838. Kunisada was no landscape man — that was Hiroshige's territory. So he did something cleverer: he took Hiroshige's already-famous station views, set them in the background behind a pale cloud, and placed a magnificent standing beauty in the foreground. Each woman connects to her station through a visual riddle — a gesture, a prop, a glance — that the viewer has to puzzle out.
You're looking at the same pigments (same colour palette — deep Prussian blues, rich reds, striking mauves), the same paper, the same Edo publishers, the same moment in woodblock printing history. But because Kunisada's name doesn't carry the same Western market premium, good impressions regularly come up at auction for €150–250.
Geki Magohachi from Yoshitoshi's Kaidai Hyaku Sensō ("Selection of One Hundred Warriors"), published in 1868 when he was just 29.
What strikes me every time is how radically different this is from anything else being produced in woodblock printing at the time. Standard musha-e gave you full-figure warriors in heroic poses with common Utagawa school figures. Yoshitoshi threw that out — here you get a brutal close-up, teeth bared, a blood-tipped blade thrusting up through clouds of black gunsmoke, enemy spears slashing across the body. It feels more like a war photograph than a woodblock print.
Geki Magohachi was a 16th-century Sengoku warrior — he never saw a rifle. But Yoshitoshi had just witnessed the Battle of Ueno during the Boshin War, and the historical names were a device to get past Meiji censorship. Everyone buying these prints knew what they were really looking at.
Only 65 of the planned 100 designs were completed before censorship and Yoshitoshi's breakdown halted production. Even incomplete, this series established the dramatic cropping, psychological intensity, and Western-influenced perspective that would define his career and eventually make him the most influential printmaker of the Meiji era.
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Wanted to share this one. Original design 1927, this is the 1978 復刻版 limited to 300.
50 × 65 cm, so genuinely massive. The bokashi work on Hotaka is what needs attention — that transition from deep indigo at the peaks through misty purple down into the hazy blue middle distance is just absurdly well executed. Colors are still bright, registration is clean across all the blocks, paper is supple but looks a bit yellowish. I suspect that they used a specific type of washi.
Obviously not a jizuri lifetime impression (those are $35k+ when they surface :D), but this one got me when I saw it for the first time.
Picked this up recently and I keep coming back to it because the longer you look, the weirder it gets.
What I find fascinating is the palette and the faces. sooty greys, ochre, brick-red, indigo, muted earth tones, with bokashi gradations in the smoke. It's pitched at night, or that pre-dawn moment when burning villages are still lighting the sky. The black holds dense across all three sheets.
And the faces — they're not Yoshitoshi faces, not Yoshiiku faces, not Yoshitora. They're heavier, blunter, almost mask-like, with these red kumadori streaks that read more aragoto-kabuki than battlefield. Stylised in a way that almost feels primitivist.
I think the explanation is biographical. Yoshimori was a Kuniyoshi pupil but spent a lot of his career between Edo and Yokohama, was one of the earliest Yokohama-e practitioners, and later drifted toward Nanga / Southern School literati painting, doing bird-and-flower works for the Western export market. By 1884 (when he died at 54) he was barely an Utagawa artist anymore in any recognisable sense.