Kaigetsudō Doshū

Kaigetsudō Doshū (懐月堂度秀, active c. 1711-1716) was one of the small group of named pupils of Kaigetsudō Ando who carried the Kaigetsudō workshop's distinctive bijin-ga style forward in the years surrounding the school's catastrophe of 1714. The Kaigetsudō workshop, established by Ando in Asakusa at the turn of the eighteenth century, had crystallized a startlingly recognizable visual formula for the depiction of standing Yoshiwara courtesans: a single high-ranking beauty rendered on a monumental hanging-scroll scale, her body cast in a strong S-curve, her elaborately patterned outer kimono falling in heavy sculptural folds that emphasized the textile's decorative surface over any naturalistic representation of the body beneath. Doshū belonged to the inner circle of named pupils who absorbed this formula and continued it after Ando's exile to Izu Ōshima in 1714 in connection with the Ejima-Ikushima Affair, the political scandal that effectively terminated the workshop's collective production.

The biographical record for Doshū is, in keeping with the Kaigetsudō school as a whole, almost entirely silent on matters of personal history. Birth and death dates are unrecorded; the active period of c. 1711-1716 — sometimes extended to the early 1720s in older catalogues — is reconstructed from the signatures and seals on surviving paintings rather than from any documentary source. Like his teacher, Doshū appears to have worked exclusively in painted hanging-scroll format, never producing the woodblock prints that the workshop's other pupils Anchi, Doshin, and Dohan used to translate the Kaigetsudō style into a mass-market medium. This restriction to painting alone places Doshū in a small subset of the Kaigetsudō circle alongside Doshin, and explains the very small number of surviving works carrying his signature: where Anchi and Dohan are represented by ten or more sumizuri-e prints in addition to their painted output, Doshū's surviving corpus is limited to a handful of hanging scrolls scattered across major American and Japanese collections.

Doshū's signature variations have been a perennial subject of attribution debate. The character 度 (do) was shared with his fellow pupils Doshin (度親) and Dohan (度繁) and was used by Ando in his own personal name. The second character appears in the literature as both 秀 (shū, 'excellence') and 種 (shū, 'seed' or 'kind'); the variant 度種 circulates in some Edo-period print catalogues and modern reference works, although 度秀 is the more commonly accepted form in Western scholarship following Richard Lane. Comparison with Doshin and Anchi has proven especially difficult: the Kaigetsudō workshop produced its paintings under a shared visual vocabulary so consistent that attributions between the named pupils rest on subtle differences of brush handling, kimono pattern repertoire, and the precise drawing of the face and hairline rather than on any obvious stylistic distance. Some scrolls carrying a Doshū signature have at various times been reattributed to Anchi or Doshin in the catalogue literature, and the small certain corpus of Doshū's work has remained genuinely tight for nearly three centuries.