Artist: Tsukioka Yoshitoshi (月岡芳年, 1839–1892) Title: Ne no hi no komatsu (子の日の小松) — Pulling Young Pines on the Day of the Rat Series: Yoshitoshi Ryakuga (芳年畧画, Sketches by Yoshitoshi) Publisher: Funazu Chūjirō, Tokyo Date: Meiji 15 (1882) Technique: Woodblock print (mokuhanga), polychrome with blind embossing (karazuri) Format: Chūban yoko-e, approx. 17 × 24 cm Signed: Yoshitoshi giga (芳年戯画, "Yoshitoshi drew for fun"), with the red Taiso seal 1. Impression & Colors: Excellent. Strong, fresh impression with unfaded colour. 2. Paper: Minor loss at the bottom right. Centrefold. Please check the images! ----------------------------------------------- About the print On the first Day of the Rat of the New Year, Heian courtiers went out into the fields to pull up young pine seedlings and gather spring herbs — a rite to draw down long life, and one of the most elegant images in the classical calendar. Yoshitoshi turns it into a pratfall. Four court ladies in white robes and trailing scarlet have gone over in a heap on the green hillside, hair flying loose, one flat on her back and upended with her legs in the air, another laughing openly, a sprig of pine still gripped in someone's fist. A single small pine stands untouched at the right, entirely unbothered. The design is a masterclass in economy: nothing but flat vermilion, blank white and two notes of green, with the ladies' robes given texture by karazuri — blind embossing pressed into the paper without ink, so the white reads as woven silk rather than empty space. It is best appreciated in raking light. Yoshitoshi Ryakuga is a set of forty horizontal chūban designs published by Funazu in 1882, drawing on Japanese and Chinese lore, history and the kabuki stage and treating almost all of it comically, in the ironic mitate register — hence the signature giga, "drawn for fun". They were printed two designs to an ōban sheet and afterwards divided, which is why the sheets carry a central fold. Sets and single sheets are held by the Walters Art Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts Boston and the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.