| Artist | Tsukioka Yoshitoshi (月岡芳年, 1839–1892), signed Yoshitoshi 芳年 with the red Taisō (大蘇) seal |
| Series | Tsuki Hyakushi (月百姿) — One Hundred Aspects of the Moon, published 1885–1892 |
| Title | Sesonji no tsuki — Shōshō Yoshitaka (世尊寺の月 少将義孝) — The Moon of Sesonji: Minor Captain Yoshitaka |
| Subject | Fujiwara no Yoshitaka (954–974), Captain of the Right Bodyguards and poet of the Ogura Hyakunin Isshu, seated alone on a hillside at first light in a pale blue kariginu, a low disc above the ridge behind him |
| Date | Red registration cartouche in the left margin: 御届明治十九年六月五日 — Meiji 19, sixth month, fifth day (5 June 1886) |
| Publisher | Akiyama Buemon (秋山武右衛門) |
| Block-cutter | Carver's seal Yamamoto (山本) in the lower right corner of the image |
| Technique | Woodblock print (mokuhanga), polychrome nishiki-e, with burnishing over the textile patterns and soft bokashi gradation in the sky and hillside |
| Format | Ōban tate-e — approx. 36 × 24 cm (14¼ × 9⅝ in.), full sheet with margins |
| Reference | Stevenson 33. Impressions of this design are held by the Library of Congress, the National Museum of Asian Art (Smithsonian), and the Art Gallery of New South Wales, among other collections. |
Impression & Colour
Very good to excellent. The keyblock is sharp — the blossom roundels and scattered sprays across the kariginu, the plucked and repainted eyebrows, the bare branches of the tree and the needle clusters of the pines all read cleanly. Colour retains its full intensity: the blue of the robe is even and unfaded, the vermillion linings are strong, and the violet of the trousers has kept its depth. The textile patterns are embellished with burnishing that flashes when the sheet is tilted to the light.
Paper
Very good. Clean, supple washi with the warm tone proper to paper of the 1880s, full margins carrying the complete publication block at the left. The print has an album backing.
⚠ Please examine all photographs carefully — they form part of the condition description.
The disc above the ridge sits low and pale, the sky above it still washed blue and the hillside behind it a flat grey. It is not the great harvest moon of the celebrated sheets in this series. It is the thin moon that is still in the sky at dawn, the one a Heian courtier saw on his way home from a night spent elsewhere — and that is the moon this particular poet is remembered for.
Yoshitaka's single poem in the Ogura Hyakunin Isshu is a kinuginu verse, written at parting after such a night. Its sense is plain and startlingly direct: a life he had thought worth nothing, if giving it up were the price of seeing her, he now finds himself wishing were long. Coming from a man who died at twenty, it has been read for a thousand years as something other than a love poem.
And the young man in the print is not looking at the moon. He sits turned slightly away from it, eyes on nothing in particular, in a robe far too large for him. Yoshitoshi gives him no incident, no companion and no gesture — only the empty morning and the sheer volume of pale blue silk, out of which a very small face looks. The design is almost entirely one colour and one figure, and it works because of what the viewer is expected to know about how little time he had left.
Yoshitaka was a son of the regent Fujiwara no Koretada, born at the height of his family's power and holding the rank of Minor Captain of the Right Bodyguards. He was composing linked verse at palace gatherings by the age of twelve. He is said to have stepped back from poetry to spare his elder brother the rivalry, and to have turned instead to Buddhist practice and the recitation of the Lotus Sutra — an unusual choice for a young nobleman with everything in front of him.
Both brothers died in the smallpox epidemic of 974, on the same day: the Ōkagami records that one died in the morning and the other in the evening, and lingers on the mother left to survive them. Yoshitaka was twenty. The temple of the title, the Sesonji, was his father's foundation and gave the family branch its name; his own son Yukinari would carry it into history as the Sesonji school of calligraphy. Naming the print for the temple rather than the man places him where the story leaves him — attached to a house that outlasted him by centuries.
Yoshitoshi shows him in court dress on rough hillside grass, the stiff black eboshi upright, the straw sandals just visible beneath the violet trousers. Nothing in the image is happening. It is a portrait of someone waiting, and the series title supplies the only event: the moon, going down.
Tsuki Hyakushi occupied Yoshitoshi from 1885 until his death in 1892: one hundred ōban designs issued in small batches by Akiyama Buemon of Nihonbashi, each built around the moon and a figure from Japanese or Chinese history, legend or poetry. New designs were awaited by collectors and sold out quickly. It is the last great series of the ukiyo-e tradition and, by common consent, Yoshitoshi's masterpiece.
This sheet was published in June 1886, in the strong early run of the series, when the designs were being cut and printed with the greatest care. Yoshitoshi trained under Utagawa Kuniyoshi and is widely regarded as the last master of the tradition. The red seal beside the signature reads Taisō (大蘇, "great resurrection"), the art name he took after the collapse and poverty of the early 1870s.
Shipping: Sent flat between acid-free tissue and rigid boards, in a reinforced carton, by tracked and insured post. Ships from Germany.
Guarantee: An original Japanese woodblock print of June 1886, published by Akiyama Buemon. Guaranteed authentic and as described, with full refund if not.