The British Museum in London announced on Wednesday that it will hold a special exhibition on September 30 to show for the first time 103 preparatory sketches for prints made by Katsushika Hokusai for his unfinished illustrated book “Banbutsu Ehon Taizen Zu”.
The exhibition will run until 30 January next year.
The preparatory drawings are believed to have been in the possession of a private individual in France after being auctioned in Paris in 1948; they were identified again in 2019 and acquired by the British Museum last year.
The postcard-sized works depict myths, landscapes, the lives of ordinary people, flora and fauna.
The preliminary sketches are often damaged in the process of making the prints, but it is thought that these works were left behind because they were not engraved on the woodblocks for some reason.
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