About this Print and the Book
A double-bookplate removed from the first volume of Kawanabe Kyosai's four volume work Kyōsai Gadan 暁斎画談, variously translated as "Kyōsai's Account of Painting," "Kyōsai's Treatise on Painting," and "Stories of Painting by Kyōsai."
The four volumes comprising Kyōsai Gadan
Note: The bound volumes are not part of this collection
Source: Suntory Museum of Art https://www.suntory.com/sma/exhibition/2019_1/display.html [accessed 3-26-2021]
Kyōsai Gadan "reveals how widely Kyōsai studied masterpieces from the past." It includes his copies of works by Song and Yuan dynasty paitners, the great Japanese master Sesshu, generations of Kano-school artists such as Motonobu and Tan’yu, Tosa and Maruyama school painters, Ogata Korin and Tani Buncho and ukiyo-e artists such as Suzuki Harunobu, Kitagawa Utamaro and Katsushika Hokusai.Beginning with the fourth illustration [in Kyōsai Gadan, Volume 1], Kyōsai offered his readers a series of anatomy drawings showing the alignment of muscles or the underlying skeletal structure of the human body.
Sources: Demon of Painting: the Art of Kawanabe Kyōsai, Timothy Clark, British Museum Press, 1993, p. 29 and Copying the Master and Stealing His Secrets: Talent and Training in Japanese Painting, Brenda G. Jordan; Victoria Weston, University of Hawaii Press, 2002, p. 103
Several pages of Kyōsai gadan reproduce Western anatomical drawings given to him by Conder, but more as a curiosity than anything else.
According to Conder, Kyōsai regarded with profound respect the scientific knowledge of anatomical form, perspective and sciography revealed to him in foreign works.
Print Details
| IHL Catalog | #297 |
| Title or Description | Drawing based on Western anatomical drawing showing front facing man and skeleton from the book Kyōsai Gadan, Volume 1 暁斎画談 |
| Artist | Kawanabe Kyōsai (1831-1889) |
| Signature | None |
| Seal | None |
| Publication Date | 1887 (Meiji 20) |
| Publisher | Iwamoto Shun 岩本俊 |
| Engraver | |
| Impression | excellent |
| Colors | excellent |
| Condition | excellent |
| Genre | ehon (illustrated book) |
| Miscellaneous | |
| Format | |
| H x W Paper | 8 1/4 x 10 in. (21 x 25.4 cm) each sheet |
| Collections Holding "Kyōsai Gadan" | Kawanabe Kyosai Memorial Museum; Waseda University Library; The British Museum 1979,0305,0.390.1; Museum of Fine Arts Boston 1997.592.1-4 |
| Reference Literature | Demon of Painting: the Art of Kawanabe Kyōsai, Timothy Clark, British Museum Press, 1993, p. 29, fig. 14. |
3-26-2021
 |  |  |  |  |