Moon over Akashi - Snow

** This is the "moon" design for Harima Province. It takes its subject from the Asagao nikki, one of the most popular love stories of the Edo stage, set at the bay of Akashi, whose moon has been celebrated in Japanese poetry for a thousand years. ** Artist: Toyohara (Yōshū) Chikanobu (楊洲周延, 1838–1912) Title: 雪月花 播州 明石の月 深雪 浅香 (Setsugekka: Banshū – Akashi no tsuki, Miyuki, Asaka). Series: Setsugekka (雪月花, Snow, Moon and Flowers) Publisher: Kobayashi Tetsujirō (小林鉄次郎) Date: 1885 (Meiji 18) Technique: Woodblock print (nishiki-e); ink and colour on paper Format: Ōban tate-e, approx. 36 × 24 cm Condition: Excellent impression with strong unfaded colour — the deep crimsons and bokashi in the background are fully preserved. Full margins with the complete publication data intact. A light diagonal folds mark without affecting the paper. A museum quality impression! About the print: This is the "moon" design for Harima, the province of the bay of Akashi. The cartouche names its two figures: Miyuki (深雪), the heroine of the Asagao nikki, and Asaka (浅香), her nurse and loyal companion. The Asagao nikki is the popular name of the puppet play Shō-utsushi Asagao-banashi (生写朝顔話), first staged in Osaka in 1832 and soon taken up in kabuki. Its heroine, Miyuki, is the daughter of the samurai Akizuki Yuminosuke. She falls in love with the young samurai Miyagi Asojirō at a firefly-viewing party on the Uji River. When a marriage is later arranged for her, she does not know that the intended husband is Asojirō himself, so she runs away from home. She weeps until she goes blind and wanders the country as a singer, until in the end the two lovers are reunited. About the Setsugekka series: The Setsugekka series, published between 1884 and 1886 by the prestigious publisher Kobayashi Tetsujirō, comprises fifty individual ōban prints. Its title derives from an ancient Chinese poetic motif associating snow, moon and flowers with the seasons, but the true subject of the series is a sweeping panorama of Japanese history, mythology and literature — from court tales and Noh drama to warrior legends and supernatural folklore. The thematic range is extraordinary: across fifty designs, Chikanobu moves from Heian-era romance to Sengoku battlefield drama, from Chinese legend to the ghost stories of Edo, treating each subject with a distinctive compositional approach and mood. In this respect, the Setsugekka stands alongside Yoshitoshi's Tsuki Hyakushi (One Hundred Aspects of the Moon) as one of the great narrative series of the late nineteenth century, and the two are regularly compared by scholars and collectors alike. What sets the Setsugekka apart visually is the richness and durability of its pigments. Spectroscopic research published in Heritage Science has demonstrated that the dominant red pigment in nishiki-e prints of this precise period (1884–1886) was not aniline dye — as is commonly assumed for Meiji prints — but cochineal carmine, a lake pigment formed from carminic acid precipitated with aluminium salts into an insoluble compound, typically mixed with vermilion (mercuric sulfide), a wholly inorganic mineral pigment. This carmine-vermilion combination produces the deep, saturated crimsons visible in the present print and accounts for their remarkable resistance to fading and water damage — a stark contrast to the fugitive naphthol reds that would appear in cheaper prints only after 1889. Combined with Kobayashi Tetsujirō's premium production standards — thicker pigment applications, high-quality paper, and deluxe printing techniques including fine bokashi and occasional metallic accents — the Setsugekka prints have retained their chromatic intensity with astonishing fidelity over nearly a century and a half.

Stima:€200

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