This page attempts to catalog all known prints in Yoshitoshi‘s series ‘Suehiro goju-san tsugi (末廣 五十三 次 – Folding-fan Fifty-Three Stages)’, usually known as the ‘Fan Tōkaidō‘.
It dates from the start of Yoshitoshi’s career, when he was about twenty-six. It thus dates from about two decades before his well-known masterpieces such as his great series “One Hundred Aspects of the Moon” (1885-1892), and “New Forms of Thirty-Six Ghosts” (often called simply “Thirty-Six Ghosts”) (1889-1892).
This series was actually a collaborative effort by several artists and publishers, including Yoshitoshi and Hiroshige II; of the prints in the series, 15 were the work of Yoshitoshi. The series commemorated the journey of the Shogun down the Tōkaidō from Edo to Kyōto to visit the Emperor, in the second month of 1863.
The name of this series comes from the shape of the title cartouche used in these prints, i.e. a fan. That cartouche contains the series name, and also the individual stage name; the latter is sometimes on the left, and sometimes at the bottom.
This page (and list) is not necessarily complete; the series is not well documented, and there may be yet other prints which have not yet come to our attention. If you know of any prints from this series which aren’t listed here, or have either i) information about any errors on the page, ii) better images than the ones below, or iii) missing information about individual prints (e.g. publisher, exact date) please let us know.
Technical details
- Dates: 1865, Intercalary month (6th month)
- Size: Ōban
- Signed: Yoshitoshi hitsu, Kaisai Yoshitoshi hitsu (some prints)
- Seals: Unread (only appear on some prints)
- Publishers: Fujikei, Yamaguchi-ya Tōbei, Ki-ya Sojirō, Ebi-ya Rinnosuke, Morimoto Junsaburō
- Block carvers: Unread
Previous cataloguings
The only known attempts to enumerate this series was in Keyes’ thesis:
Roger. S. Keyes, "Courage and Silence: A Study of the Life and Color Woodblock Prints of Tsukioka Yoshitoshi 1839-1892", Cinncinnati, 1982
where it appears as series #138.
