Utagawa Yoshiiku

Original Japanese woodblock print - 19th century

19th century

Signed: Harunobu ga Series: Series: Eight Fashionable Parlor Views (Furyu zashiki hakkei)? Format Japanese: chuban Provenance: Private Collection, Philadelphia Collection of McCleaf ...

Woodcut on cream laid paper, 7 1/4 x 2 1/2 inches (182 x 63 mm), narrow margins. Laid down to non-archival board with scattered soiling and some adhesive staining. Okumura Masanobu (Japanese 1686 – 13 March 1764) was a Japanese print designer, book publisher, and painter. He also illustrated novelettes and in his early years wrote some fiction. At first his work adhered to the Torii school, but later drifted beyond that. He is a figure in the formative era of ukiyo-e doing early works on actors and bijin-ga ("pictures of beautiful women"). While Masanobu's early life is largely undocumented, he is believed to have been born about 1686, possibly in Edo (modern Tokyo). Edo was a small fishing village when Tokugawa Ieyasu chose it as his administrative capital of the Tokugawa shogunate, and by the early 17th century the city had prospered and its population had grown to half a million. Masanobu appears to have been self-taught painter (though he did study poetry under Tachiba Fukaku); he is not known to have belonged to any artistic school. His early work shows the influence of the Torii school of ukiyo-e painting...

In image of the Tokugawa family paying homage to Tosho-gu Shrine in Nikko. Tokyo: Matsuki Heikichi, 1896 Woodcut in ink with embossing and hand-coloring in watercolor on handmade m...

c. 1883. Kakemono: 28 3/8 x 9 7/16. Repairs and staining; fine color. An extremely scarce historical image. Signed Chikanobu. Housed in a 36 x 15 1/2-inch archival mat, ready for your choice of frame. The Russo-Japanese War...

Torii Kiyonaga. (after). Twentieth-century woodcut printed on silk, based on the original Kiyonaga 1784 woodblock. 13 1/2 x 6 1/2 (image and sheet). Scattered foxing. Signed "Torii K...

Utagawa Kunisada (Toyokuni III), 'Kabuki Actors as Two Samurai Warriors in Confrontation Under Cherry Blossoms', woodblock print, 1849-53. Signed in the left panel, lower left, and r...