絵本太閤記 上
Ehon Taikoki, volume one, a Japanese woodblock-printed picture book by Okada Gyokuzan, published in Tokyo in 1886 by Bunjidō for a general readership of the period. The four pictures show armoured samurai in dense hatched ink: a seated lord receiving an attendant under a patterned ceiling, a warrior leaping over a fallen lantern under a dark sky, two men breaking through a wooden gate with split planks flying, and two armoured figures beside a pine tree. A designer could draw on the dense cross-hatching for texture, the dynamic diagonals of the action scenes, and the vertical columns of calligraphy as framing devices.
