On Stage in Osaka: Actor Prints from the MFA Collection

On Stage in Osaka: Actor Prints from the MFA Collection. "...On Stage in Osaka: Actor Prints from the MFA Collection includes distinctive prints made during the nineteenth century in Osaka that have never before appeared in an exhibition. Until recently, interest in Japanese prints has focused primarily on the works made in Tokyo (called Edo until 1868). From the late seventeenth to the early twentieth centuries, artists in Edo produced single-sheet woodblock prints of subjects including actors, beautiful women, historical scenes, and landscape. The Osaka print tradition, by contrast, concentrated almost exclusively on the Kabuki theater and featured an exaggerated, caricature-like quality that almost certainly influenced major Edo artists such as Sharaku and Toyokuni I."