Artist: Utagawa Kuniyoshi 歌川国芳 (1797–1861), unsigned, as is usual for shunga Series: Ōmi hakkei 遇見八景 ("Eight Views of Lovers' Meetings"), also written 逢見八景 Date: 1833 (Tenpō 4) Reference: Shirakura Yoshihiko, Japanese Shunga of Kuniyoshi (Heibonsha, 2012), p. 82 Technique: Woodblock print (mokuhanga), nishiki-e Format: Ōban yoko-e, approx. 25 × 36 cm, with central fold ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Paper & condition Good colours and a good impression. There is soiling and scuffs towards the centre and along the margins. A professional cleaning can improve the composition. The sheet has a central fold, which is found on all known impressions of this series. This sheet carries an album backing. Fair condition overall! Please check the images carefully! ---------------------------------------------------------------------- About the Series Few shunga series can claim a place in the history of Western painting. Kuniyoshi's Ōmi hakkei is cited as an inspiration for Gustave Courbet's L'Origine du monde, painted in 1866 and now in the Musée d'Orsay. Research by Yukiko Oki suggests that Courbet very probably knew sheets by Kuniyoshi when he chose the painting's radical close framing. The series title is a pun. The Eight Views of Ōmi, eight celebrated scenes of Lake Biwa, was one of the favourite themes of Edo-period printmakers. Artists had parodied it for generations, and Suzuki Harunobu had already made an erotic version of the related "Eight Parlour Views" around 1768–70. Kuniyoshi writes Ōmi with the characters 遇見, "meeting and seeing", and turns the eight landscapes into eight meetings of lovers. He keeps the landscape theme in view through a fan-shaped inset on every sheet, printed in the new Prussian blue. The pigment was imported from 1829 and quickly became popular because it was cheap and resisted fading. Ōmi hakkei is one of Kuniyoshi's early shunga projects, made at the start of the Tenpō era. At that time he was also producing the warrior prints that had made him famous. Kuniyoshi usually published his erotic work unsigned or under playful pseudonyms such as "happy keeper of white cats". Prints from this series are very rare and often hammers in Japan for ~150,000 YEN per sheet.