Nishikawa Sukenobu

Nishikawa Sukenobu (1671-1750) was the towering figure of Kyoto ukiyo-e during the first half of the eighteenth century, the artist who more than any other defined what Kamigata-e — the printmaking culture of the Kyoto-Osaka region — would look like in the decades before Edo's polychrome revolution. Working almost exclusively in the medium of the ehon, or illustrated printed book, Sukenobu produced an enormous body of bijin-ga (pictures of beautiful women) that wedded the refinement of Kyoto's classical painting traditions to the new commercial appetites of the urban townspeople. His quiet, observant women — kneeling at writing desks, adjusting hairpins before mirror stands, walking under plum blossoms, instructing children, taking lessons on the shamisen — became the visual template against which generations of later ukiyo-e artists would measure their own depictions of feminine beauty.

Born in Kyoto in 1671, the second year of the Kanbun era, Sukenobu trained first in the Kano school under Kano Eino, and then in the gentler, more lyrical Tosa school under Tosa Mitsusuke. This dual training — the disciplined ink line of Kano and the courtly color sensibility of Tosa — is the foundation of everything that distinguishes his mature style from the Edo ukiyo-e of his contemporaries Hishikawa Moronobu and Torii Kiyonobu. Where Edo printmaking of the same decades trafficked in bold contour, kabuki theatricality, and the assertive sensuality of Yoshiwara courtesans, Sukenobu's women are softer, more inward, and more clearly drawn from the rhythm of Kyoto domestic life: the daughters of merchant households, the geisha of Gion, the young wives of the Nishijin weaving district. His line is supple and unhurried; his compositions favor genre vignettes over grand parade.

Sukenobu's signature contribution to Japanese print culture was the bijin ehon — the picture book devoted to the depiction of women in all their social gradations, costumes, occupations, and seasonal pleasures. Working closely with Kyoto publishers such as Hachimonjiya, he produced a steady stream of ehon from the 1710s through the late 1740s: Hyakunin joro shinasadame (One Hundred Women Classified According to Their Rank, 1723), a systematic catalogue of female types from empress to serving maid; Onna man'yo keiko soshi (1728), a manual of feminine accomplishment; and a long sequence of poetic albums whose titles — Ehon Tokiwagusa (Picture Book of the Evergreens, 1731), Ehon Asakayama (1739), Ehon Hana Momiji (Flowers and Maple Leaves, 1747), Ehon Masukagami (True Reflections on the Life and Manners of a Woman, 1748), Ehon Ogurayama (Picture Book of Ogura Hill, 1749) — read like a slow-moving anthology of classical Japanese poetic landscape, repopulated with the women of Sukenobu's own day. These books circulated nationwide, and through them Sukenobu's Kyoto vision of feminine beauty became the de facto reference for bijin-ga across Japan.

The ehon format mattered. Where single-sheet prints in Edo were sold as inexpensive ephemera, the multi-volume picture book was a more durable and respectable object, often sold to upper-merchant and minor samurai households as a kind of refined gift. Sukenobu's ehon could be openly didactic — the keiko soshi manuals taught calligraphy, etiquette, and dress — or playfully erotic, as in the privately circulated shunga albums for which he was equally famous. In 1722, the Kyoho-era authorities included Sukenobu among the artists targeted by their tightening censorship of illustrated books, and several of his erotic albums were officially banned; he continued working under his own name on respectable subjects while reportedly producing erotic work under pseudonyms. This brush with censorship is itself evidence of how thoroughly his name had come to stand for the printed image of women in early-Edo Japan.