Masterpieces Selected from the Ukiyoye School. With Brief History of the Development of the School, Biographical Sketches of the Artists, and Some Critical Descriptions

5 volume study and presentation (in English) of the history of Ukiyoye painting and woodblock printmaking, defined in the preface as genre pictures and popular works depicting manners and customs of the time as opposed to classical works, including an altogether 211 pp. text distributed throughout the volumes, 156 fine text illustrations, mostly from line drawings, and 170 superb mounted plates, some in photogravure, but most from exquisitely rendered original woodblock prints done by an array of artists after the original works. Several leaves in the second volume damaged at fore-edge and into the extremities of the sheets; a sharp object pierced the chitsu case. Large folio. Illustrated paper covered boards, elaborately tie-bound in the Japanese manner, housed in damaged chitsu cases (one case lacking). Tokyo (Shimbi Shoin) 1906-1907. One of six hundred sets. A complete set of a spectacular work, marred only by some damage to the contents of the second volume, containing nearly 150 original color woodblock prints, focusing not only on the popular woodblock prints of the 18th through 20th centuries but on the entire history of Japanese genre imagery. Examples of the highest levels of painting from the Kano school forward were culled from private and public collections and include many Imperial Treasures; noted artists were asked to make exacting woodblock prints after those works. A serious art-historical undertaking; descriptions and essays were contributed by noted Japanese scholars and translated from the Japanese to English by Goodrich, a professor of English in Kyoto. A beautiful work, and fundamental to the study of Japanese genre painting.