Morikuni Tachibana Galleries

During the first half of the eighteenth century Morikuni (1679-1748) illustrated a number of multi-volume, woodblock-printed picture books. The titles of five books which included pictures of flowers and (or) birds are shown below. To see a book's pictures click on its title. For most books Morikuni used a drawing style which is often called 'boned' because a black line is used to draw the shape and surface features of an object (i.e., the object's skeleton). However, in his last book (i.e., Unpitsu Soga) Morikuni used a 'boneless' drawing style in which objects were not outlined in black. Both his 'boned' and 'boneless' pictures were colored in only shades of gray because full color printing would not be perfected until the 1760s in Japan.