Title: “Mount Fuji from Edobashi bridge at Dusk” 江戸橋夕暮富士
From the series: ‘Tokyo meisho-zu’ 東京名所図 (Famous Views of Tokyo)
Artist: Kobayashi Kiyochika 小林 清親 (1847–1915)
Publisher: Maria Shobo マリア書房, Kyoto
Year of publication: 1950s, with newly carved woodblocks based on the first edition from 1879 (Meiji 12)
Size: 42 x 27.3 cm
Condition: small ink stain in the lower left corner of the margin. Otherwise very good
Price: 125 Euro
‘The Japanese city of Edo ceased to exist Sept. 3, 1868. Renamed Tokyo (“Eastern Capital”) by Japan’s new rulers, the city became the central experiment in a national drive towards modernization.
A self-taught artist and minor retainer of the Tokugawa shogun deposed in 1868, Kiyochika (1847–1915) returned to Tokyo from self-imposed exile in 1874 to discover his hometown transformed by railroads, steamships, gaslights and brick buildings—all beyond imagination just a few years earlier. He set out to record these new scenes, where old and new stood together in awkward alliance, in an auspicious and ambitious series of 100 woodblock prints.
While a devastating fire engulfed the city in 1881, effectively ending the project, the 93 prints he had completed were unlike anything previously produced by a Japanese artist. Kiyochika used age-old techniques to produce the prints themselves, but chose unusually subdued colors and mimicked the look and feel of Western photographs, copperplate engraving and oil painting.’ (Smithsonian)
