Description
Tsukioka Yoshitoshi, apprentice to ukiyo-e master Kuniyoshi since his adolescence, was twenty years old when he first began to make sketches of severed heads and dismembered corpses. Soon he would start to incorporate this imagery into his work, and his vivid and bloody battle scenes quickly caught the public eye. Sometimes referred to as ‘The Sadistic Collection Of Blood’, this series was an unashamed exercise in atrocity which took the concept of muzan-e (‘cruelty prints’) to new extremes of violence and gore.