This page attempts to catalog all known prints in Yoshitoshi‘s series ‘Zensei shiki (全盛 四季 – The Four Seasons at their Height)’. Although one would logically expect for there to be four prints in a series with this name, only three are known: Summer, Winter, and Spring.
The series dates from towards the end of Yoshitoshi’s career, when he was about forty-four years old. It thus dates from just slightly 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).
After Yoshitoshi moved to Tokyo’s Nezu district in 1880, he began to frequent the fashionable Daishorō brothel. One courtesan there, called Maboroshidayū (Phantom Lady), was a particular favourite of his. In this series, Yoshitoshi featured the Daishorō and Maboroshidayū. (One night, after he performed an unspecified act with her, she presented him with a bill for 100 yen – an enormous sum, one year’s salary for him from the newspaper EiriJiyū for his prints for them. It is not known whether this was simply a result of her need for money, or was related to the unspecified act.)
Technical details
- Dates: 1883 (9) – 1884 (3)
- Size: Ōban triptych
- Signed: Ōju Yoshitoshi ga
- Seals: Taiso
- Publishers: Akiyama Buemon
- Block carvers: Horikō Noguchi Enkatsu; Yamamoto to
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 #458; he listed only three prints in the series. We use the Keyes numbers to order the prints below.
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.
