Toyohara Chikanobu, Signed Japanese Woodblock Prints, Japan, 1890s

Toyohara Chikanobu, Signed Japanese Woodblock Prints, Japan, 1890s

A pair of Japanese woodblock prints by Toyohara Chikanobu (Yoshu Chikanobu, 1838–1912), depicting elegantly dressed court ladies in traditional ceremonial attire. The first, A Courtyard Lady in a Ceremonial Robe, was printed in 1893, while the second, Three Court Ladies in Ceremonial Robes, was printed in 1896. Both works display Chikanobu's refined attention to textile patterns, delicate linework, and subtle coloration. Each is presented in a finely custom-matted frame with ebonized panels and ornate gilt decorations. Both works are signed and dated on the reverse.

Woodblock Prints, Paper, Ebonized Wood, Gilt Decoration; Japan, 1893 and 1896

It is tempting to call Chikanobu the ‘lost artist of the Meiji’. In a sense that assessment is true; Chikanobu was a very fine maker of woodblock prints who, with his contemporaries Yoshitoshi and Kunichika, documented the cultural struggle of the emergent Japan of the modern era. As a young man, Chikanobu was a student of the great ukiyo-e artists, Kuniyoshi, Kunisada and Kunichika, although he didn’t become a serious artist until later in his career.
Biographically, perhaps more than any artist, Chikanobu experienced the changing politics of Japan in the late nineteenth century. Like French impressionist artists such as Degas and Manet, who manned the barricades in the siege of Paris in 1870, Chikanobu saw action fighting on the side of the defeated Tokugawa Shogunate against the modernising and reinstated Emperor's forces at the battle of Hakodate in 1868.

Height : 32 inches; Width : 27 inches; Depth: 1.25 inches