This page attempts to catalog all known prints in Yoshitoshi’s series ‘Kokon hime kagami (Mirror of Beauties Past and Present – 古今 姫 鑑)’.
It dates from the middle of Yoshitoshi’s career, when he was about thirty-seven, and just recovering from a serious slump in his life. It dates from about a decade 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).
The title cartouche in many of these prints exhibits a particular form of visual punning common among Japanese literati; the word hime (meaning ‘princess’ or ‘young noble-lady’), normally written with the character 姫, is written with other characters in many prints, characters which have the same sound, but a different meaning. Since many of the prints show women of other classes (e.g. courtesans), the title is usually translated with a word such as ‘beauty’ substituted for ‘noble lady’.
This page (and list) is not necessarily complete; it 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, i) 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: 1875-1876 (Sources disagree on the dates, and there are no visible censor seals.)
Size: Ōban
Signed: Oju Yoshitoshi ga
Seal:
Publishers: Okura, Yorozumago
Block carver: Hori Hidekatsu
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 #331; he listed eight prints in the series.
We use the Keyes numbers for the first eight, and have numbered the rest in the order in which we discovered them; as far as we know, the prints in the series do not appear to have any numbers on them.
