Ikkei Shosai Sold at Auction Prices

Ikkei Shosai was a pupil of Hiroshige III. He is best known for views of Tokyo during the transformation into a Western city with stone buildings, steel bridges, railways and steam locomotives. Among these views is a series of comic scenes of life in Edo. For Western collectors these puns are difficult to understand, especially when the comic is connected with a play on different meanings of Japanese words. Laurance P. Roberts (see bibliography) characterizes the woodblock prints by Ikkei Shosai poignantly as "comic scenes of Edo life in the early Meiji era" (Edo meant here as the capital Tokyo).

Ikkei Shosai is said to have designed circa two dozen triptychs. They must be very rare. We have seen only few and these were surprisingly well made in technical and artistic terms, in my view, better than the two series for which he is famous.