The Collection

Art your guests
won’t stop asking about.

You know the moment — someone walks into your home, pauses in front of a print, and asks “Where did you find this?”That question is what we design for. Most of the art pieces in our collection are pulled from century-old private archives that never made it online, never appeared on Pinterest, and can’t be reverse-image-searched. Your walls become the only place anyone will ever see it.

These are not mass-produced reprints of the Mona Lisa. They come from prewar journals scattered across private libraries and university vaults — publications so rare that most art historians have never held a copy. We scan, restore, and release them one at a time. Once you hang it, it becomes a conversation piece no one can ignore.

Art you actually understand

Most print stores sell you a pretty image with no name, no history, no context — or worse, AI-generated filler that never existed in the first place. We do the opposite. Every artwork ships with a detailed description in English and Japanese: who made it, when, why it matters, and what to notice when you look closer.

You don’t need an art degree to appreciate a Hiroshige woodblock or a 1920s Parisian salon nude. You just need someone to give you the story. That’s what our descriptions do — they turn a beautiful image into something you can talk about with confidence. When your guest asks about the print on your wall, you’ll actually have something fascinating to tell them.

Real art, real history, real stories — not nameless AI posters from a content farm.

Made by hands, not prompts.

The internet is drowning in AI-generated content — mass-produced, synthetic imagery that references no real moment, credits no real author, and vanishes from memory the moment you scroll past. We refuse to participate in that flood. Every single piece in our collection was created by a real human being, exhibited at the highest-level salons and exhibitions of Japan and the world, and printed in physical journals over a century ago.

We cherish this art. We praise the authors by name. We protect the history they left behind — because much of it barely survived. Entire artist communities were destroyed after the firebombing of Tokyo in 1945. Studios, printing houses, unsold editions, personal archives — all gone in a single night. What remains are scattered pages in private hands, and we are bringing them back to life.

When you hang one of these prints, you’re not decorating — you’re preserving. You’re keeping alive the work of artists whose names were nearly lost to fire and time. And you’re making a quiet statement: that real craft, real vision, and real history still matter more than anything a prompt can generate.

Let us learn from the past how to create, inspire one another, and protect what we have from the horrors of war.

What it contains

Ukiyo-e masters

Woodblock prints by Hiroshige, Utamaro, Kuniyoshi, Koryusai, and Kikugawa Eizan — reproduced in full colour from the original plates.

Western painting

Academic, impressionist, and salon works by Degas, Ingres, Zorn, Sargent, Ottmann, Seignac, and others.

Stage and photography

Kabuki dancers, ballet studies, silent-film portraits, and interwar photographic experiments.

Cities, maps, sculpture

European streets, Japanese temples, technical diagrams, and modern exhibition sculpture.

Why you won’t find this elsewhere

This material is effectively lost to the public — scattered across private collections, attics, and a handful of university libraries that hold incomplete runs. The surviving pages show a cosmopolitan visual culture before war, reconstruction, and time erased much of its context. Most of these artworks cannot be found anywhere on the internet. They do not appear on stock photo sites. You would need an appointment at a university library just to have a look at the pages we have.

A visual encyclopaedia of world art, published for a Japanese audience that wanted to see everything — now restored for your walls.

How editions are made

Every page is scanned at 600 DPI minimum. We preserve the texture — paper grain, subtle foxing, the warmth of century-old ink. Only distracting damage is removed: dust, tears, binding wear. The result prints cleanly at A2 or larger without losing the character of the source.

Files are delivered as instant downloads — no accounts, no subscriptions. Buy, download, print at home or a local shop, frame, hang.

Who we are

We’re two brothers — one in Heidelberg, one splitting time between Tokyo and Zürich. The archive grew from a personal obsession into something worth sharing. Every piece in the shop is something we’d hang in our own homes.

Questions? Suggestions? We’re at 100yoa.store@gmail.com