This page attempts to catalog all known prints in Yoshitoshi‘s series ‘Dai nihon shiryaku zue (大 日本 史略 圖會 – Illustrated History of Great Japan)’. (The title is now usually written with the simplified characters 図会.)
The series consists of illustrations of famous incidents in the lives of selected Japanese Emperors and mythical or semi-mythical figures. (The name and ordinal of the Emperor are given at the bottom of the large vertical cartouche on the left.)
It dates from toward the end of Yoshitoshi’s career, when he was about forty. It thus dates from a little less than 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).
Technical details
- Dates: 1879 (4) – 1880 (4)
- Size: Ōban triptych
- Signed: Taiso
- Seals: Taiso Yoshitoshi
- Publishers: Tsunashima (1879), Matsumoto (1879-1880), Kobayashi (1880)
- Block carvers: Watanabe Hori Ei
Previous cataloguings
One of the first 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 #418; he listed 10 prints in the series. The next listing was in:
Eric van den Ing, Robert Schaap, "Beauty and Violence: Japanese Prints by Yoshitoshi 1839-1892", Havilland, Eindhoven, 1992
where it appears as series #37 (pg. 124). It also appears in:
Shinichi Segi, "Yoshitoshi: The Splendid Decadent", Tokyo, Japan, 1985
where it appears as black and white illustrations 118-119, page 104.
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.
