THE SERIES COLLECTION · KEYES 458
Four Seasons at their Height
全盛四季
Zensei shiki
Tsukioka Yoshitoshi · 09/1883–03/1884
THE SERIES COLLECTION
FOUR SEASONS AT THEIR HEIGHT全盛四季
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夏 根津 庄やしき 大松楼Summer: The Daishōrō 'flower garden' in NezuVIEW PRINT ↗#1Summer: The Daishōrō 'flower garden' in Nezu1883/9
冬 根津 庄やしき 大松楼Winter: The Daishōrō 'flower garden' in NezuVIEW PRINT ↗#2Winter: The Daishōrō 'flower garden' in Nezu1883/12
春 荏原郡 原村 立春 梅 図Spring: View of the plums on the first day of spring at Hara Village in the Ebara DistrictVIEW PRINT ↗#3Spring: View of the plums on the first day of spring at Hara Village in the Ebara District1884/3Print numbers retain the original page’s catalogue order and numbering. The original catalogue references are preserved below. All three panels of each known triptych are shown together.
About the Series
The series dates from towards the end of Yoshitoshi's career, when he was about forty-four years old. It thus dates from just slightly before his well-known masterpieces such as his great series "One Hundred Aspects of the Moon" (1885-1892), and "New Forms of Thirty-Six Ghosts" (often called simply "Thirty-Six Ghosts") (1889-1892).
After Yoshitoshi moved to Tokyo's Nezu district in 1880, he began to frequent the fashionable Daishorō brothel. One courtesan there, called Maboroshidayū (Phantom Lady), was a particular favourite of his. In this series, Yoshitoshi featured the Daishorō and Maboroshidayū. (One night, after he performed an unspecified act with her, she presented him with a bill for 100 yen - an enormous sum, one year's salary for him from the newspaper EiriJiyū for his prints for them. It is not known whether this was simply a result of her need for money, or was related to the unspecified act.)
Publication details
- Dates: 1883 (9) - 1884 (3)
- Size: Ōban triptych
- Signed: Ōju Yoshitoshi ga
- Seals: Taiso
- Publishers: Akiyama Buemon
- Block carvers: Horikō Noguchi Enkatsu; Yamamoto to
Catalogue references and numbering
Print numbers retain the original page’s catalogue order and numbering. The original catalogue references are preserved below. All three panels of each known triptych are shown together.
The only known attempts to enumerate this series was in Keyes' thesis:Roger. S. Keyes, "Courage and Silence: A Study of the Life and Color Woodblock Prints of Tsukioka Yoshitoshi 1839-1892", Cinncinnati, 1982where it appears as series #458; he listed only three prints in the series. We use the Keyes numbers to order the prints below.
This page (and list) is not necessarily complete; the series is not well documented, and there may be yet other prints which have not yet come to our attention. If you know of any prints from this series which aren't listed here, or have either i) information about any errors on the page, ii) better images than the ones below, or iii) missing information about individual prints (e.g. publisher, exact date), please let us know.