Details
The image
A horse drawn in mid-stride, its body built from a few confident curves, the mane and tail suggested by short strokes and the ground left entirely blank. The figure fills the sheet vertically, so the animal appears to be moving out of the paper rather than standing on it.
Where it comes from
The print belongs to Yatsuo no tsubaki, the botanical series Taguchi Tomoki produced between 1860 and 1869 and the horse is one of the subjects that steps outside the plants, a figure from legend rather than from a field. Edo-period printmaking treated such animals as emblems: a stride, a gesture, a curve carried the meaning and the drawing had to survive being cut into a block and printed in flat colour without losing that movement.
On the wall
It suits a study, a hallway or a living room with plain walls, where a single figure in movement gives a wall direction. Because the composition is vertical and the palette limited, it works on a narrow wall particularly well. In a group it should be the piece that introduces movement.
In company
Paired with another print from the Taguchi Tomoki collection, it reads as a sequence.Avoid hanging it beside dense illustration, the empty ground is what makes the stride read.
