Kemari at the Palace, Kyoto, 1863

The Kyoto view in a series of famous sights, and the sight chosen was a football game.

Work: colour woodblock print
Maker: Utagawa Yoshimori
Date: 1863
Era: The Victorian game · 1870–1900
Source: National Diet Library of Japan · via Wikimedia Commons

Of all the sights in Kyoto, the series chose a game.

Format

The full-resolution scan, colour-managed to the source — yours to print, study, and explore.

Size

$29.00

The story

The title on the sheet reads, in Japanese, Kyoto on the Tōkaidō: a view of kemari at the imperial palace. Utagawa Yoshimori made it in 1863, the third year of Bunkyū, for Tōkaidō meisho fūkei, a series of famous views along the Tōkaidō road. When the series reached Kyoto, the sight it chose was the court football game, in which players keep one ball in the air with any part of the body except the arms and hands. Kemari had been popular since the Heian period and was still being drawn as one of the sights of the road when this was printed. The National Diet Library of Japan holds the impression.

See it on your wall

The piece, in the room it was made for

Kemari at the Palace, Kyoto, 1863, printed large and framed — in the den, the club bar, the supporters’ bar. Every edition ships ready to become the piece the room is built around.

Kemari at the Palace, Kyoto, 1863 framed on the wall

About this reproduction

A reproduction of colour woodblock print — Utagawa Yoshimori, 1863 — from the copy held by National Diet Library of Japan · via Wikimedia Commons. The source. The work was published before 1931 and is public-domain verified.
Printed faithful to that source scan — restore honestly, disclose always. We do not re-colour it, complete it, or interpret it; the piece you receive is the image as it survives, halftone grain honored as history, not damage.
Printed to order on museum-grade cotton-rag stock with pigment inks — the pairing is rated 100+ years.
Colour-managed to the source; the tone of the paper and the ink is the period’s, not ours.
Ships in 5–10 business days, rolled in a heavy-wall tube (framed editions ship flat-packed).
If it arrives less than perfect, we reprint or refund — your choice.

Why our pieces cost more than a poster: a poster is a mass run on wood-pulp stock, colour-corrected to whatever flattered the press that day. This is one sheet, pulled for you, at a size where the maker’s hand is visible — the linework, the halftone grain, the lettering — on materials made to outlast their owner.

From the same collection