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| SOKEN, Yamaguchi (1759 - 1818) |
Yamato jimbutsu gafu
'An Album of People of Yamato' |
 
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Publishing details: Publishers: Hishiya Magobei and others, Kyoto Dated: Kansei 11 (1799), 9th month, 1st day Size: 25. 5 x 17. 5 cms (c. 10" x 6 7/8") Collation: 3 vols. (bound as one); dark green covers; title slip worn; intro- duction, 3 pp.; tabel of contents: 3 pp.; containing 105 pp. of line illustrations; last page colophon, signed; dated: 1799 (as above); the next known editions are those of 1802 and 1804. Condition: Very fine impressions; except for a few minor marks and very little soil, a generally very fine copy without any paper defects. - Probably FIRST EDITION - ref. no.: E 601885 price: € 3,950.00 - Because of the large number of illustrations pictures from the book are presented in a downloadable PDF file. - |
 
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"Soken was famous at his time for his detailed paintings of beautiful women, perfectly drawn without a single hair out of place.
The free drawing, the suggestive atmosphere, and the light touch of Yamato Jimbutsu gafu ('People of Yamato') showed
his debt to haikai poetry and the example of poet-painters like Yosa Buson (1716-84) and Goshun. It was his humor and
his sympathy for his subjetcs, though, that endeared Soken to his readers. 'People of Yamato' was one of the most popular
ehon of the nineteenth century ... Soken gave many artists both the permission and a vocabulary with which to draw the
world just as they saw it ... (and) gave artists like Shuho and Kiho just the lift they needed to produce their masterpieces. Most Japanese books of this period were printed on semi-transparent paper. Even though the sheets were printed on one side and folded in half, faint images would often show through. Most readers simply disregarded this, just as they overlooked the 'invisible' assistants dressed in black on the theater stage. Soken planned to use the transparency of the paper deliberately in the manner of earlier poetry anthologies. He knew his readers would be slow to notice what he was doing, but the longer they took to notice, the greater their surprise and pleasure. His first drawing (see pic at left) is of a flowering branch of plum blossom. Behind it, the face of an older man shows through from the other side of the page, creating an allusion of distance and physical space. Turning the page, it is 'Early Spring' on a crowded Kyoto street (above right). Men greet one another, children play, a mother strolls with her baby - a familiar scene but never before drawn with such an eye for body language, for the shrug and grimace that inflect the public faces and politeness. The wall at the left shows through from the next opening (bottom right), where a young dancer walks off confidently with a child. An old woman hobbles along behind, bent by the weight of her burden. She lifts a tissue to her eyes. Is she crying? Is the ghostly image of the young mother floating beside her a memory? Soken creates the tableaux, but deliberately leaves the rest to his readers' imagination." (Roger S. Keyes in "Ehon - The Artist and the Book in Japan"; The New York Public Library; 2006) |
 
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