Priests in Kyoto - Hand-Colored Albumen Print 1870/1890 1870/1890

Priests in Kyoto is an hand-inked Albumen print with aniline applied on hardcover. Very good conditions, slightly faded shade, perfectly legible details . Cardboard cm 26 x 34; Print cm 22x 27 Yokohama School print (Yokohama Shashin), realized during the Meiji dinasty (1868-1912). From a collection printed in the Shin-E-Do studio, as evidenced by the ink stamp on some copies. This print does not show visible stamps on the front. On the lower margin of the print some hand-written captions in black ink Italian on the cardboard. In the picture a large group of priests posing under a Torii in Kyoto. This particular typology of prints was born in Yokoama around 1860 by the Italian photographers Felice Beato and Raimund Von Stillfried , who, for the first time, experimented the production of hand-colored albumen by means of aniline colors in Japan. During the Meiji period, the Yokohama school produced prints for foreign customers, who, at the same time, sought both an image linked to an ''exotic'' aesthetic of uses, customs and landscapes, and a high quality product, the result by the famous Japanese craftsmanship. These photographs, made with a sublime technique for both printing and coloring, achieved enormous success so that the production, as a typology, remained unchanged for almost forty years, in which some ateliers acquired the reproduction rights of others, thus making very difficult the exact attribution. The extreme documentary value prints concerning the Japanese culture still today hand down us the last true images of the feudal culture which ended during the Meiji dynasty.