Katsukawa Shunsen

Katsukawa Shunsen (勝川春扇, 1762–c. 1830) was a late-Edo ukiyo-e designer of bijin-ga (images of beautiful women) and yakusha-e (kabuki actor prints) who worked principally in the Bunka era (1804–1818) and the early Bunsei years that followed. He is also recorded in the literature as Shunkō II, the name he is said to have inherited from his teacher's senior fellow student, and his active period as a print designer ran from about 1805 to about 1821. Surviving examples are held in major international collections including the Art Institute of Chicago, the British Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Harvard Art Museums, and the Library of Congress, where they are routinely catalogued under the formula "Katsukawa Shunsen (Shunko II), Japanese, 1762–c. 1830" to distinguish him from the several other Katsukawa designers whose names begin with the shared first syllable Shun-.

Shunsen entered the Katsukawa school as a pupil of Katsukawa Shun'ei (1762–1819), one of the leading actor-print designers of the late eighteenth century and a senior figure in the lineage descended from the school's founder, Katsukawa Shunshō. He is also said to have studied classical Japanese-style painting under Tsutsumi Tōrin III, an unusual two-track training that distinguished him from many of his Katsukawa fellows whose work remained almost exclusively confined to the commercial print format. By the time Shunsen began designing prints in the first decade of the nineteenth century, the Katsukawa school had passed its mid-eighteenth-century peak and was operating in an Edo print market increasingly dominated by the Utagawa school under Toyokuni and his pupils. Shunsen's career belongs to this later moment, when the standard Katsukawa formulas — the hosoban actor portrait, the diptych confrontation scene — were being adapted to the new tastes of the Bunka era, with its larger sheet sizes, more elaborate color work, and renewed interest in fashionable bijin subjects.

In the Bunka period Shunsen produced a substantial body of full-color woodblock prints across the standard ukiyo-e genres. His bijin-ga depict courtesans of the licensed Yoshiwara quarter in elaborate parading kimono — works such as the British Museum's bijinga of a courtesan in a peacock-feather robe and another in a storm-dragon-patterned outer kimono show the type at full development, with the figure isolated against a plain ground, the patterned robe rendered in deeply pigmented colors, and the print issued in the tall kakemono-e format suited to the high-relief display of a single dominant figure. His actor prints adopt the larger ōban triptych composition that had become standard for kabuki publishers by the Bunka era, with two or three sheets combining to form an extended scene of multiple performers and stage business. The British Museum holds Shunsen triptychs dated to 1805, 1806, and 1811, the last preserving a specific Nakamura-za production of the first month of 1811. Beyond bijin and yakusha-e, Shunsen produced landscape and travel subjects, including the Art Institute of Chicago's Travelers in Snow and the British Museum's Travellers on the Coast of Futami — the latter depicting the famous Futami beach in Ise Province where the celebrated Wedded Rocks (Meoto Iwa) draw the New Year sunrise.