79.5 x 105 cm

The scene depicted here is Gion no yozakura, the night-time viewing of cherry-blossom in Kyoto’s Maruyama Park, which opened in 1871. The source of this striking composition has not yet been identified, but it is possibly by the Kyoto artist Asai Chu, who designed a number of landscape-format albums of urban scenes, for example Jusei gako, published in 1895.

J. Earle, Splendors of Imperial Japan: Arts of the Meiji period from the Khalili Collection, London 2002, cat. 298, p. 404.