YOSHITOSHI . 月之百态 . 正品 日本木版画 . 浮世绘 - 日本 - Meiji period (1868-1912)

TSUKIOKA YOSHITOSHI (1839–1892)
Title: Shibaimachi no akatsuki しはゐまちの暁月 — "Theater-District Dawn Moon"

Series: Tsuki Hyakushi (月百姿) — One Hundred Aspects of the Moon; Stevenson no. 43
Date: Meiji 19 (1886) — red date cartouche 御届明治十九年六月五日 printed in the left margin
Publisher: Akiyama Buemon (秋山武右衛門)
Format: Ōban tate-e — approx. 36 × 24 cm
Technique: Woodblock print (mokuhanga), polychrome (nishiki-e)
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Condition

Excellent colour and impression, on clean paper. The orange passage in the background is lightly oxidised — entirely normal for this pigment and this date, and unobtrusive. The full publication block survives in the left margin: date cartouche, guild seals, the artist's own address seal, and the Akiyama Buemon / Kokkeidō.
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The Scene

Dawn over the theatre district, and Yoshitoshi builds the whole print around a single graphic idea: the near figure in full colour, everything behind her in silhouette. A woman turns her head to the left, her hair dressed in a heavy chignon, a pale cloth draped over one shoulder; her blue robe is scattered with nadeshiko — pink fringed dianthus — and the red-lined edges of her sleeves flash against it. Behind her, a row of figures reduced to flat grey shapes moves through the half-light towards the theatre buildings, whose upper storeys and blank hanging signboard catch the first pallor of the sky. Above them a soft white moon still hangs in a lavender wash, birds crossing it; at the left horizon a band of orange marks the sun that has not yet arrived.

The silhouette device is the point of the design. It is a borrowing from Western illustration and photography, the sort of thing Yoshitoshi absorbed and reworked throughout his late career, and it does something no Edo-period print quite does: it separates the picture into two temperatures, the woman lit and immediate, the world behind her not yet resolved into daylight. Anyone who has been out at five in the morning knows the effect exactly.

The subject is the rhythm of theatre-district life itself. Kabuki days in Edo and early Meiji began extraordinarily early, and the streets around the playhouses filled long before the sky did — the crowd going one way, those finishing the night going the other. The moon here is not a symbol so much as a clock.
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The Series — Yoshitoshi's Late Masterpiece

Tsuki Hyakushi (One Hundred Aspects of the Moon), published by Akiyama Buemon between 1885 and 1892, is universally regarded as the crowning achievement of Yoshitoshi's career and one of the last great monuments of the ukiyo-e tradition. Across one hundred designs drawn from history, legend, literature, and — as here — the living festival culture of Edo, the moon serves as the unifying thread. This sheet, published in June 1886 during the strong early run of the series, preserves the full publication block in the margin: the red date cartouche and the Akiyama Buemon address.

Yoshitoshi trained under Utagawa Kuniyoshi and is widely regarded as the last great master of ukiyo-e. Impressions of this design are held by the Library of Congress, the National Museum of Asian Art (Smithsonian), the Art Gallery of New South Wales, and other major collections.