Katsushika Taito II

Katsushika Taito II (active 1810-1853) was a Japanese print designer and book illustrator who carried the Hokusai school style into the second quarter of the nineteenth century. He took his name from his teacher, Katsushika Hokusai, who used the art name Taito between roughly 1810 and 1819 before passing it to one of his most accomplished pupils. Taito II's biographical details are sparse—even his birth and death dates are unrecorded—but his surviving surimono, illustrated books, and harimaze prints document a long and productive career that bridged the late ukiyo-e of Hokusai's own generation and the print culture of the early Tempo and Koka eras.

The transmission of the Taito name was characteristic of how reputation passed through the Hokusai workshop. Hokusai cycled through many art names over his life—Shunro, Sori, Hokusai, Taito, Iitsu, Manji—and each name became, in effect, a workshop signature that could be granted to a senior student. When Hokusai relinquished Taito around 1819 and adopted Iitsu, his pupil received the name and the right to sign work with it. The pupil then signed himself Katsushika Taito, sometimes with the additional designation Beika or Beikasai, and continued to design prints in a manner closely aligned with his teacher's: bold figural compositions, decorative kacho-ga, and finely tuned surimono for poetry circles.

Taito II's surimono are his most distinctive contribution to the Hokusai-school legacy. Surimono were privately commissioned, deluxe-quality woodblock prints distributed by poetry groups (kyoka-ren) to mark seasonal occasions, New Year, or specific poetic themes. They were printed in small editions on thick hosho paper using shikishiban format—a near-square sheet of roughly 21 by 18 centimeters—and embellished with metallic pigments, blind embossing (karazuri), and elaborate color gradations that ordinary commercial prints could not afford. Taito II designed surimono for several of the Edo kyoka circles, most notably the Katsushika-ren, the poetry group his teacher Hokusai had helped to lead and which retained close ties to the Katsushika lineage. His series Katsushika gosekku (Five Annual Festivals for the Katsushika Circle), produced in 1822, paired figures drawn from rural and urban Edo life with kyoka verses contributed by the group's members. Sheets from this series, such as A woman from Ohara leading an ox and Geisha looking up at a cuckoo, exemplify the surimono aesthetic—seasonally specific subjects, calligraphic poem cartouches, and the kind of refined printing effects that made these works prized objects for the poetry circles that commissioned them.

Bijin-ga, or images of beautiful women, formed a steady current in Taito II's surimono production. He often depicted women drawn from specific social roles—court ladies, itinerant musicians, geisha, women from the village of Ohara north of Kyoto known for their distinctive folk dress—rather than the generic beauties of mainstream ukiyo-e. Compositions such as Court lady standing amidst pines, Two women playing shuttlecock, Woman on the bridge watching the moon, and A woman from Ohara on horseback show a designer who used the small surimono format to compress evocative moments of seasonal life into single, finely printed sheets. The pictures function as both image and gift: each one carried a poem on the same surface, and the figure's pose, costume, and setting were chosen to amplify the verse's seasonal reference.