Tanaka Masunobu

Tanaka Masunobu (田中益信, active c. 1722-1735, with prints sometimes catalogued as late as the 1750s) was an early-to-mid eighteenth-century Edo ukiyo-e artist who worked at the transitional moment between the hand-coloured sumizuri-e and beni-e of the early eighteenth century and the early polychrome benizuri-e of the Hōreki era. He is documented today through a relatively small number of surviving prints scattered across major museum collections — the British Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, and the Tokyo National Museum among them — and is grouped by twentieth-century print scholarship with the secondary Edo masters who developed the urushi-e (lacquer picture), beni-e (rose-red picture), and early uki-e (perspective picture) modes in the decades before Suzuki Harunobu's full polychrome revolution of 1765.

Biographical detail on Masunobu is sparse. The name 'Masunobu' (益信) carries the 'nobu' character that links many early Edo print artists into the broad Torii- and Okumura-school lineages of the early eighteenth century, and some early Western catalogues list him as a follower or studio associate of Okumura Masanobu (奥村政信, 1686-1764), the dominant Edo print designer of the period and a major innovator of the uki-e perspective format. Whether Tanaka Masunobu trained directly under Okumura Masanobu, worked alongside him, or simply absorbed his manner from the open visual culture of early-eighteenth-century Edo publishing is not settled in the scholarship; his prints share enough with the Okumura idiom — soft figural drawing, generous interior settings, and an interest in the perspective experiments that Okumura Masanobu pioneered with uki-e — to make the affiliation plausible without making it certain.

Masunobu's output centres on bijinga (pictures of beautiful women) and the related genre of pleasure-quarter interior scenes. Surviving prints depict courtesans of the Shin Yoshiwara at their daily activities — arranging flowers, attending sleeping kamuro (young attendants), receiving male visitors, playing musical instruments — and the kind of nocturnal teahouse vignettes that were a staple of early-eighteenth-century Edo print publishing. He worked in the hand-coloured beni-e mode characteristic of the 1730s and 1740s, in which a single black-line block was printed and then over-painted by hand with the rose-pink beni pigment derived from safflower, alongside other mineral colours; some of his later sheets show early benizuri-e printed colour. He is also recorded among the small group of designers who took up the uki-e (perspective picture) format that Okumura Masanobu had developed in the 1740s, producing perspective views of classical literary subjects and famous places that adapted Western one-point perspective to traditional Japanese narrative scenes.

Masunobu's prints are scarce on the market and in museum collections today, and he is not a household name in ukiyo-e history. But the British Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, the Tokyo National Museum, and a small number of European holdings preserve enough of his work to document an artist of distinct compositional ambition working in the Okumura orbit during the late beni-e and early benizuri-e years. He belongs, with Furuyama Moromasa, Nishimura Shigenaga, Okumura Toshinobu, and Ishikawa Toyonobu, to the cohort of secondary early-Edo masters whose surviving prints help reconstruct the visual and technical history of ukiyo-e in the decades between Hishikawa Moronobu's late seventeenth-century single sheets and Suzuki Harunobu's full-colour nishiki-e of the mid 1760s.