Tsukioka Settei

Tsukioka Settei (月岡雪鼎, 1710-1786) was an eighteenth-century painter and book illustrator who founded the Tsukioka line of artists in Osaka and stood as one of the most influential figures in the Kamigata-e tradition. Working at the western pole of Japanese visual culture rather than in the shogunal capital of Edo, Settei produced bijin paintings, illustrated books (ehon), and shunga albums that defined the Osaka and Kyoto inflection of ukiyo-e at the moment Suzuki Harunobu was launching the polychrome nishiki-e revolution far to the east. His work survives in the Art Institute of Chicago, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, the British Museum, the Library of Congress, and Ritsumeikan University, documenting an artist who carried Kanō-academy lineage into the popular print world of Kamigata.

Born in Ōmi Province (modern Shiga Prefecture) in 1710, Settei was originally named Masanobu and used several artistic names over his long career, including Rōgetsudō, Shinten'ō, Settei, and Tōrin. His formal training came not from the ukiyo-e ateliers but from the Kanō school, the orthodox samurai-class painting academy that dominated official Japanese pictorial culture from the late sixteenth century through the Meiji Restoration. Settei studied under Takada Keiho (1674-1755), a leading Kyoto Kanō master, absorbing the academy's rigorous training in brushwork, classical figural conventions, and Chinese-derived subjects. This pedigree distinguished Settei from most ukiyo-e artists, whose training came through workshop apprenticeship within the print trade, and marked his mature output with a refinement of line unusual in the ukiyo-e tradition.

In mid-career Settei moved to Osaka and converted his practice toward ukiyo-e, applying his Kanō training to bijin-ga, historical figures, and illustrated literature for the Kamigata commercial market. The Kamigata-e tradition Settei helped define differed from the Edo ukiyo-e of his contemporaries Suzuki Harunobu, Torii Kiyomitsu, and Katsukawa Shunshō: where Edo prints emphasized contemporary fashion, kabuki actor portraits, and the Yoshiwara pleasure quarter, Kamigata artists drew more heavily on classical literary subjects, courtly beauties, and the courtesan culture of the Shimabara and Shinmachi quarters in Kyoto and Osaka. Settei's bijin paintings, executed in the ink-color-and-gold-on-silk technique of his Kanō training, established a Kamigata model for elegant female portraiture that influenced regional taste for decades.

From his Osaka studio Settei produced an enormous output of illustrated books, the principal commercial vehicle for his art. The Kamigata publishing industry specialized in ehon and gafu (painting manuals) combining refined Kanō-school draftsmanship with the subjects of urban Japanese life, and Settei was among its most prolific contributors. His Kingyoku gafu (1771), held in the Art Institute of Chicago in a six-volume set, is one of his most celebrated late painting manuals, gathering model compositions that Kamigata artists and amateurs consulted for figure drawing. His Ehon Misao gusa (Onna Buyū Kehai Kurabe), also at the Art Institute, addresses the eighteenth-century subject of female martial heroes from classical literature. Other major books included Eshō chūshaku yūjo gojūnin isshu (1752), a courtesan-themed parody of the Hyakunin Isshu anthology, and Onna buyū yoso oi kurabe (1757).