絵本太閤記 2
A Japanese ehon picture book, Ehon Taikoki volume 2, illustrated by Hokkyo Gyokuzan and published in Tokyo in 1917 by Kokusho Kankokai for a readership of collectors and readers of woodblock-style prints. The four pictures are black-and-white woodblock-style scenes of samurai warfare: a castle compound with a fighting party on a river, armoured troops massed on a wooded ridge, a riverside encampment with banners, and pine-lined hillside with soldiers and a tall flag. A designer could take from them the dense, hatched linework, the stylised pine and cloud shapes, and the compositional habit of stacking landscape planes above crowded foreground figures.
