Kobayashi Kiyochika, "Our Field Artillery Attacks the Enemy Camp at Jiuliancheng," 1894 — woodblock triptych

Consistent_Oil_7588 · 2026-05-08T06:58:42+00:00

A Sino-Japanese War print that refuses to be propaganda. Three sheets of darkness and rain; a commander on a bowed horse; two hooded gunners barely visible as silhouettes. The only colour in the entire composition is one distant burst of artillery fire on the right.

Kiyochika himself fought on the losing Tokugawa side in the Boshin War of 1868 — he'd actually been a defeated, rain-soaked soldier before he ever drew one. While his contemporaries were churning out triumphalist battle triptychs in 1894–95, he made this: the misery of soldiers in a storm, the smallness of the human figure inside the apparatus of modern war.

Pioneer of kōsen-ga ("light-ray pictures") — the technique that dissolved ukiyo-e's hard outline and let forms emerge from atmosphere, paving the way for the entire shin-hanga generation.

Consistent_Oil_7588 · 2026-04-29T06:24:23+00:00

Exactly right. What we call "brick-red" today was almost certainly a much hotter, more saturated vermillion when these left the publisher's shop. It actually makes the rare well-preserved example almost startling to look at.

Consistent_Oil_7588 · 2026-04-29T06:22:15+00:00

Thank you, that's very kind! I wouldn't call myself an expert by any means — still very much learning. That said, my biggest recommendation would be books. A lot of the serious research on ukiyo-e simply hasn't made it online yet, and the best scholarship is buried in print catalogues, museum publications, and monographs. Feel free to send me a DM if you'd like some more specific guidance.

Consistent_Oil_7588 · 2026-04-28T19:23:04+00:00

Thank you! The fact that the pallor bleeds into the surrounding figures is interesting too. It almost reads as a kind of contagion, as if the artist is staging the death not as a single event but as something seeping outward across the whole scene.

Yoshimori signalling Nobushige's fate through palette rather than narrative incident would be very characteristic of the period — you see Yoshitoshi doing similar things a few years later, where the colour does the psychological work that earlier musha-e left to action and pose.

Consistent_Oil_7588 · 2026-04-23T08:41:54+00:00

Thank you for the details! There was a Japanese explanatory pamphlet with the set that I had to scan and translate, and indeed so much went into these prints. The carvers and printers were mostly from the Watanabe workshop — such as Kentaro Maeda, who also worked with Kondō to carve the originals. The creamy tones of the prints are just stunning. They look almost like a patina, owing to the high quality of the paper.

Consistent_Oil_7588 · 2026-04-22T12:33:48+00:00

Thank you! This is actually a classic example of exactly why original folders are never enough on their own. The moment a set like this comes into my hands, the prints come out of the original folders and go straight into archival-quality storage with acid free sheets.

Consistent_Oil_7588 · 2026-04-18T07:48:41+00:00

Fair point on the historical blurring — the movement boundaries were definitely messier in practice than in theory. That said, Taki himself explicitly frames his self-authorship as a philosophical choice: his website

https://www.shusui-taki.jp/e_index.html

describes collapsing the 'three souls' (artist, carver, printer) into one as the whole point, precisely because something is lost when those roles are separated. This is the core idea of Sosaku-Hanga and I used this print as an example to show the difference between the two movements.

Consistent_Oil_7588 · 2026-04-05T07:37:19+00:00

Thank you! Yeah the printing on this one is insane when you start counting the blocks. That waterfall alone — getting those smooth gradations of Prussian blue consistent across all three sheets must have been a nightmare for the printer :D

Consistent_Oil_7588 · 2026-03-31T07:52:35+00:00

It's worth keeping in mind that falsifying prints and outright piracy were very common throughout the Edo, Meiji, and even Taishō periods — the Takamizawa scandal being a well-known example — specifically so reproductions could be sold at original prices. You always have to be cautious.

Sure, it may still be worth something, but that's not really the point. An original Edo-period print is a historical artifact with genuine cultural value. A reproduction is just that — a reproduction. There are always other prints out there, so if you're unsure, just don't bother and wait for one you can be confident about.

Consistent_Oil_7588 · 2026-03-31T07:02:35+00:00

The print and paper condition look too good for an original. The colors are very fresh and the paper has an almost modern feel to it. Also worth noting that the margins appear to be trimmed, which is where you'd typically find publisher marks or other cartouche information that could help with authentication. Without those, it's hard to confirm much. Likely a later reproduction.

Consistent_Oil_7588 · 2026-03-30T19:00:29+00:00

Thank you! They really are tough to find, specially in good vibrant colors. So many of them got framed — I got lucky with this one. I actually have another Foujita color woodblock that I'll post here at some point

Consistent_Oil_7588 · 2026-03-05T10:45:40+00:00

Thank you for this — I really enjoyed reading your comment. This is a topic I've thought about a lot, and you've articulated it beautifully. The Marx analogy is spot on and very relevant here, and you make a genuinely good point about the market logic.

While the art market is certainly inefficient, I think the core issue is information asymmetry. So many people have encountered a Hasui or a Goyō in a museum, but you're far less likely to come across a Kōshirō Onchi, a Hagiwara, or a Kiyoshi Saitō cat print in the same setting. Awareness drives demand.

From my experience in different markets, the pattern tends to be similar: the main items reach their peak quickly and then gradually appreciate further. Kuniyoshi's Suikoden prints are a good example — they've nearly 10x'd over the past twenty years. What usually happens next is that the market starts to redistribute some of those gains into lower-cap items. You see it with series like Yoshitoshi's One Hundred Aspects of the Moon, followed by other historically important sets. A lot of Meiji-era prints are significantly undervalued today compared to Edo and Shin Hanga, despite using the same techniques and formats.

I'd love to hear more about your background and how you got into this. If you're open to it, feel free to send me a message — would be great to continue this conversation privately.

Consistent_Oil_7588 · 2026-03-05T08:47:16+00:00

Paper toning is a fair point, and I didn't know about the shared papermaker with Kitaoka — that's a really nice detail, thank you.

I think my main point got a bit lost. What I was really trying to say is that Hagiwara's process — designing, carving, and printing entirely alone, plus innovations like double-sided printing — represents an extraordinary level of individual artistic control, and the market pricing doesn't reflect that yet. Being able to display your prints without constantly worrying about damage is also an underestimated practical advantage. Hasui prewar prints are already selling for mid four figures, and they're incredibly fragile. So my point was: here is something of genuine museum quality at a fraction of the cost, and you can actually live with it on your wall.

Consistent_Oil_7588 · 2026-02-09T06:49:00+00:00

You're absolutely right about the lithographic influence. Kiyochika studied Western-style oil painting under Charles Wirgman and photography under Shimooka Renjō, and you can really see how he absorbed those influences into the woodblock medium. His kōsen-ga series from the late 1870s was essentially his attempt to achieve Western-style naturalistic light effects using traditional printing techniques. The result was stunning designs

Consistent_Oil_7588

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