Miyagawa Chōshun

Miyagawa Chōshun (1683-1753) stands as one of the most accomplished and distinctive painters of the early-eighteenth-century floating world, a master who chose to work almost exclusively in hand-painted scrolls rather than in the woodblock medium that came to dominate ukiyo-e. His decision to remain a painter at a moment when his contemporaries were rushing toward the printed sheet preserved within ukiyo-e a current of refined, individually crafted brushwork that connects directly back to the earliest yamato-e narrative tradition, and it has made his surviving scrolls among the most prized objects in the entire genre.

Chōshun was born in 1683 in Ise province, in the village of Miyagawa, from which his family name was eventually drawn. His given name at birth was Nagasaburō, and he is sometimes encountered in early records under the studio names Chōzaemon and Chōzaburō. The biographical details of his youth are sparse, as is typical for ukiyo-e artists working outside the main woodblock publishing houses, but it is generally accepted that he moved to Edo as a young man, sometime in his early twenties, drawn like so many provincial artists of his generation to the cultural and commercial energy of the shogunal capital. There he settled in the Suwa-chō district of Asakusa, near the temple precincts and within walking distance of the Yoshiwara pleasure quarter that would supply much of his subject matter.

The foundation of Chōshun's pictorial training lay in the Tosa school's classical yamato-e tradition and in the work of Hishikawa Moronobu, the founder of ukiyo-e as a coherent genre, who had died in 1694 when Chōshun was still a child. While there is no evidence of direct apprenticeship with any Moronobu pupil, Chōshun's mature style reflects a deep and patient absorption of Moronobu's compositional sensibility, his treatment of the courtesan as a worthy pictorial subject, and his synthesis of Tosa-derived narrative formats with the urban subject matter of contemporary Edo. To this inheritance Chōshun added a sumptuous, jewel-toned color palette and a refinement of figural drawing that set his work apart from anything else being produced in the floating-world tradition of his time.

The single most decisive feature of Chōshun's career was his refusal to participate in woodblock printing. Where his exact contemporaries Okumura Masanobu, Nishikawa Sukenobu, and the early Torii masters were transforming ukiyo-e into a print-dominated commercial enterprise, Chōshun maintained a studio that produced only hand-painted works, primarily kakemono (hanging scrolls) and emakimono (handscrolls). This decision had significant economic consequences: by working only one painting at a time, he could never reach the broad popular audience that printmakers commanded, and his clientele remained restricted to the wealthier patrons who could afford individual paintings. But the choice also gave his work qualities that no printed image could achieve, including the full chromatic range and subtle modulations of brushed silk painting, the textural richness of mineral pigments applied in layers, and the intimate scale of works designed to be unrolled and contemplated rather than displayed publicly.