Japanese Woodblock Print, 1916, published by Kanao Bunendo, Tokyo; full title is Mayasan> The Buddhist Temple Toritenjoji

SIZE IN INCHES: aiban, 9.5 x 13.75 inches

COMMENTS: Number 17 from the most famous and ambitous work of the "sketch-tour books" popular in Japan in the early twentieth century. The series includes 30 large-format prints of views of places around Osaka and Kobe. The blocks and all copies in storage at the publisher were destroyed in the great Kanto earthquake of 1923.

MIZUSHIMA NIHOFU (1884-1958) was a painter, illustrator, cartoonist, manga artist, novelist, playwright and essayist. The son of the writer and translator Mizushima Shinjir?, his own eldest son was the famous science fiction author Kyodomari Aran (1910-2008).

Mizushima graduated from the Japanese painting department of Tokyo Art School (now Tokyo University of the Arts) in 1909 and studied with the painter and illustrator Kubota Kinsen (1875-1954). In 1913 he became an illustrator for the newspaper Osaka Asahi Shinbun, where his baseball cartoons brought him popularity, and he would go on to illustrate for the Tokyo Nichinichi Shinbun. In 1916 he began working with the book publisher Bun'end?, contributing to the sketch-tour book Pictures in Famous Places in Osaka and Kobe (Hanshin meisho zue) and in 1920 he would illustrate and author the book Fifty-Three Stations of the T?kaido-- The Inland Sea (Tokaido gojusan tusgi – Setonaikai), which is considered to be the last major work of the sketch-tour genre. Along with Maekawa Senpan (1888-1960), Okamoto Ippei (1886-1948), Hiratsuka Un'ichi (1895-1997) and the fourteen other members of the Tokyo Manga Association he contributed to Tokaido gojusantsugi manga emaki published by Chuo Bijutsu Kyokai in 1921, consisting of 2 scrolls, each over 30 feet long and 10? high, containing 55 paintings.

As a book illustrator, his drawings for Jun’ichiro Tanizaki's Ningyo no Nageki (The Mermaid’s Lament) published by Shun'yodo in August 1919 and the 1950 translation of the Chinese folk legend The Illustrated Journey to the West stand out.

He was active in the avant-garde movement belonging to groups such as the Kojusha (Art Group) (1912-1917) and Daiichi-Sakka-Domei (First Writers Alliance, or DSD) characterized as a radical nihonga group...dedicated to establishing social equality, and integrating stylistic and theoretical developments in European avant-garde an into Japanese-style painting". Merritt notes, that he "specialized in kamishibai (paper picture shows)" and that he was "possibly active with early sosaku hanga circles."

VG, flaws as shown