Kawanabe Kyōsai (河鍋暁斎)

Condition Report

Impression & Colours

Excellent. A strong, sharp impression with crisp keyblock lines throughout, including the fine brushwork of Kyōsai's line and the small kana inscriptions. Colours are fresh and well saturated across all three sheets: the rose and brick tones of the octopus, the Prussian blue of the robes, the vermilion of the cartouche and flames, and the soft grey of the sky all hold their intensity.

Paper

Good. The paper shows some signs of age, including minor creases visible in the margins, and light toning consistent with a print of the 1860s. The image areas present well, and the triptych is fully presentable as it stands. Slight trimming.

⚠ Please examine all photographs carefully to judge the creasing, toning and overall condition for yourself.

A Rosary Around an Octopus

The title refers to hyakumanben nenbutsu (百万遍念仏), a Buddhist rite in which a congregation passes an enormous rosary from hand to hand while invoking Amida Buddha a million times. The Museum für angewandte Kunst in Vienna notes that the rosary used for the rite is strung from 1,080 beads. By Kyōsai's day the phrase had also become shorthand for tedious, endless repetition, and the word dōke (道化, here written phonetically どふけ) means clowning or buffoonery.

Kyōsai builds the entire triptych around that rosary. A single chain of beads runs through all three sheets, gripped by a crowd of caricatured figures who sit in a ring around a huge octopus. The beads tie the composition together and carry the eye from sheet to sheet, while the octopus anchors the centre. The left sheet is kept largely open, so that the crowded centre and right sheets gain even more force by contrast. Above the octopus, a row of round-headed figures carries kana on their blank faces; according to the Wellcome Collection's reading, together they announce that this is a nonsense picture dressed up as a puzzle picture, followed by a cheer. Kyōsai is winking at the viewer, and the joke invites us to look for the hidden meanings anyway.

Five Tentacles, Five Powers — The Satire of 1864

The hidden meanings are there. The octopus has only five tentacles, not eight. The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and the Wellcome Collection both read it as the five foreign powers with which Japan had signed unfavourable trade treaties in 1858: Great Britain, the Netherlands, France, Russia and the United States. The figures holding the rosary stand for the factions inside Japan, praying in unison but unable to agree on how to deal with the foreigners.

Several of the figures can be identified. In the discussion of this design in Andreas Marks' Japanese Woodblock Prints in 200 Masterpieces, Shōki the Demon Queller stands for the Mito branch of the Tokugawa, and the figure with the head of a shachi (the golden dolphin-fish of Nagoya Castle's roof) stands for the Owari branch. The MAK in Vienna proposes further readings for the centre sheet: the large octopus as the weakened shogunate itself, the blue bearded face below as Ii Naosuke, the chief minister assassinated in 1860, and the figure with the fan inscribed 大當 ("great success") as one of his assassins. As with all Bakumatsu satire, the readings differ between scholars, and the ambiguity was part of the design: it had to pass the censor, and it did, as the aratame seal shows.

The timing matters. Only a year earlier, Kyōsai had designed prints for the great Tōkaidō series published for Shogun Tokugawa Iemochi's journey to Kyoto in 1863. Here he turns to the same political world with open mockery, at a moment when the shogunate's authority was visibly failing.

Kyōsai Hyakkyō — A Series Named for Madness

The series title plays on the artist's own name. In these years he signed himself Kyōsai (狂斎), "studio of madness," and Kyōsai Hyakkyō (狂斎百狂) means "One Hundred Madnesses by Kyōsai." The character 狂 also belongs to kyōga (狂画), the comic pictures that had made him popular since he left the Kanō school and took the name Seisei Kyōsai in 1858. The left sheet here is signed 惺々狂斎戯画, "a playful picture by Seisei Kyōsai."

What sets the series apart is the quality of the drawing behind the jokes. Kyōsai was a fully trained Kanō painter, and it shows in the confident, calligraphic line, in the way each face is given its own expression, and in the control of a crowded design across three sheets. The humour is broad; the hand is that of a master.

Kawanabe Kyōsai — The Demon of Painting

Kawanabe Kyōsai (1831–1889) was born in Koga in Shimōsa Province and brought to Edo as a small child. At the age of seven he began studying with the ukiyo-e master Utagawa Kuniyoshi, and in 1840 he moved to the Surugadai Kanō school under Maemura Tōwa, who is said to have called the boy a gaki (画鬼), a "demon of painting." He completed his Kanō training, then set out on his own, combining classical technique with the comic spirit of kyōga.

His satire had real consequences. In 1870, at a public painting party, he drew pictures judged to mock high officials and was arrested and jailed. After his release he changed the character of his name from 狂斎 to 暁斎, keeping the same pronunciation. The present triptych, signed with the earlier 狂 form, belongs to the Bakumatsu years when that satirical voice was at its sharpest. In later life Kyōsai counted the architect Josiah Conder among his pupils, and his work was introduced to Western audiences by the collector Émile Guimet.

Collector's Note

Dōke Hyakumanben is one of Kyōsai's best-known Bakumatsu satires and a standard reference point for political caricature in ukiyo-e. It is catalogued in Timothy Clark's Demon of Painting and in the Comic Genius exhibition catalogue, and it was selected by Andreas Marks for Taschen's Japanese Woodblock Prints in 200 Masterpieces. Impressions are held in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Wellcome Collection in London, the MAK in Vienna and the Ishikawa Prefectural Museum of Art. The present set is complete with all three sheets, in excellent impression and colour.