u/Consistent_Oil_7588

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.