The Meiji Prints housed in the Collection of the Royal Museums of Art and History

The introduction of ukiyo-e (浮世絵), the Japanese traditional genre of woodblock printing, to the Western collectors in the second half of the nineteenth century resulted in their preference of romantic images of beauties, actors and landscapes, while the prints of the Meiji-period were ignored due to their strident coloration, unusual topics and decline in production. However, Meiji prints still thrived for example through the depiction of the Satsuma Rebellion of 1877. Konishi (1977) made a first attempt by introducing general works on the rebellion, although it is missing an in-depth analysis of their socio-political context. In addition, while Tsukioka Yoshitoshi (月岡芳年) (1839-1892) was the most commissioned artist during the rebellion (Stevenson 2001), there is no elaborate study conducted on this part of his oeuvre. Therefore, my master thesis conducted a case study on the eight Satsuma prints by Tsukioka Yoshitoshi housed in the collection of the Belgian Royal Museums of Art and History (Brussels) to discern the following question: Considering the socio-political context of the Meiji era, what aesthetics did Yoshitoshi apply to depict several episodes of the revolt, how concordant are the designs with the facts of the rebellion and what role did the publisher play in the production of the prints? This paper will analyze two of the eight prints.no ISBN/ISSNstatus: publishe