The archive / Ukiyo-e / Takiyasha & the Skeleton Spectre
Takiyasha & the Skeleton Spectre
Utagawa Kuniyoshi · 1797–1861
3 variations + a matched story print, every standard frame ratio. sRGB · up to 300 DPI · personal-use license.
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Sizes in the download
Print-ready files at every standard frame ratio below — the full image, nothing cropped:
Every size here is print-ready, sharp at viewing distance. Up close, the print is crispest at 300 DPI up to about A3; at larger sizes the cream mat carries the print to the frame while the painting sits at its sharpest within.
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The work
One colossal skeleton, where the story called for many.
A single colossal skeleton dominates the triptych. Kuniyoshi's invention was to condense his source into that one giant. In Santō Kyōden's original tale, the climactic battle pitted warring armies of small skeletons against each other. Kuniyoshi gave us one demon instead of many.
The story
A princess raises the dead in a ruined palace.
The setting is the ruined palace at Sōma, where Princess Takiyasha works her sorcery. She is the daughter of Taira no Masakado, the rebel warlord; after his failed rebellion and death, she summons the ghosts of fallen soldiers as one enormous skeleton. Her target is Ōya no Tarō Mitsukuni, the imperial agent. He defeats the plotters in the end.
Why it matters
Born in a moment of censorship.
The print arrived around 1844, when the Tenpō Reforms of 1841 to 1843 came down hard on kabuki and on prints of actors and courtesans, pushing ukiyo-e artists toward new subjects. No precise Western print model has been firmly identified for the skeleton. Scholarship notes that detailed European anatomical imagery reached Kuniyoshi through 18th- and 19th-century texts, some of them translated.
The file & the facts
- Title
- Takiyasha & the Skeleton Spectre
- Artist
- Utagawa Kuniyoshi
- Year
- c. 1844
- Medium
- Woodblock triptych
- Original
- 35 × 71 cm (triptych)
- Collection
- British Museum, London
- Rights
- Public-domain print · faithful reproduction (PD-Art) · British Museum, London — 1915,0823,0.915-916. Digital image: Wikimedia Commons (public domain)
- File
- sRGB · JPEG · 150–300 DPI
