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.Kyōsai’s copy of Lacoon struggling with the serpents. "...[T]he figure is bald and drawn with the major muscle groups revealed as if it were a type of anatomical study." The drawing appears in Volume I of Kyōsai Gadan along with several other anatomical drawings, two of which are represented in this collection. (See Kyōsai Gadan, Anatomical Drawing of Front Facing Man IHL Cat. #297 and Kyōsai Gadan, Anatomical Drawing of Rear Facing Man, IHL Cat. #298.)
Kyōsai based his drawing on an image of the Greek marble sculpture Laocoon and His Two Sons (see picture below) in the Musei Vaticani, Rome. (The sculpture may date anywhere from the second century B.C. to the first century A.D.)
The original sculpture
Print Details
| IHL Catalog | #296 |
| Title or Description | Drawing based upon sculpture "Laocoon and His Sons" 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 | e-hon (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 | Copying the Master and Stealing His Secrets: Talent and Training inJapanese Painting, Brenda G. Jordan and Victoria Weston, University ofHawaii Press, 2002, p.97, fig. 4.7 |
3-26-2021
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