fanning the flames

A Visual Revolution: The Japanese Emperor in Popular Nishiki-e

Alice Y. Tseng

Much ink has been spilled on Emperor Meiji’s transition from nonvisual to visual. Scholars have investigated his initial photographic sessions in 1872 and 1873, the proliferation of woodblock prints that featured him in the 1880s to the early 1890s, the construction of his “true likeness” (go-shin’ei) in 1888 from a combination of drawing and photography, and the posthumous painting cycle of eighty works housed in the Meiji Memorial Picture Gallery (Seitoku Kinen Kaigakan) that required more than two decades to complete in 1936.3

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