御代之花
Miyo no hana (flowers of the empire)
vol. 9

The prints presented here are from an album in a series of at least 16 volumes published in the 1890s. Our prints are from volume 9. All prints have been damaged by worms, but still retain a documentary value. A few prints (2, 5 and 10) are inspired by works by more ancient identified artists, and print 8 is an unacknowledged copy of a print by Keinen Imao (or is it the other way around?). Print 5 (the warbler and Adonis flower) also inspired a print by Bairei Kono. The captions below the images are from the table of contents. The format of our prints is 24x31cm.

Volume 3 in the series is available at the British Museum. The Ritsumeikan University database mentions that volumes 5, 6 and 16 are at the Freer Sackler Gallery of Art, but they are not available online. We extracted the bibliographical information below from these two sources.
Editor : Yamada Kotaro 山田光太郎編
Publisher : Fujii Magobei 藤井孫兵衛
printer : Kanda Shosaburo
carver : Nakamura Busuke