Yanagawa Shigenobu

Yanagawa Shigenobu (柳川重信, 1787–1832) was a Japanese ukiyo-e printmaker, painter, and book illustrator, best known as a senior pupil and son-in-law of Katsushika Hokusai and as one of the most accomplished designers of surimono — the privately commissioned, lavishly printed poetry-cards that flourished in the first decades of the nineteenth century. He worked within the Hokusai studio during the years when his teacher was producing the Hokusai Manga, and he is regarded today as one of the important non-Hokusai surimono designers of his generation, alongside Kubo Shunman, Totoya Hokkei, and Teisai Hokuba.

He was born in 1787 (Tenmei 7). His original family name was Suzuki — he is recorded in early sources as Suzuki Shigenobu — and he took the surname Yanagawa from the Yanagawa-chō district of Edo with which he was associated. The details of his early training are imperfectly documented, but he entered Hokusai's circle as a young man and progressed through the studio ranks. He used several art names over the course of his career, and museum catalogues list him as Yanagawa Shigenobu I to distinguish him from a later pupil who succeeded to the name and is now usually called Shigenobu II.

Shigenobu married Hokusai's daughter Omiyo, a union that bound him closely to the studio; in time Hokusai also took him as an adopted son. He continued to work within the Hokusai orbit, and his prints of the 1820s remain stylistically continuous with the studio idiom.

The form on which Shigenobu's modern reputation principally rests is the surimono. These were luxury woodblock prints produced not for the commercial market but as private commissions by kyōka (comic poetry) clubs and individual patrons to mark the New Year or to accompany privately circulated verses. They were printed in small editions on fine paper and embellished with karazuri (blind embossing), metallic pigments, and mica, and each carried one or more kyōka poems alongside an image that played pictorially against the poem's theme. The roughly square shikishiban sheet was the standard surimono format during his most productive decade. During a documented period in Osaka between about 1822 and 1825 — where he worked with the block cutter and printer Tani Seikō and with the Tsuru-ren poetry circle — he produced the sequence for which he is best remembered, the Costume Parade of the Shinmachi Quarter (Ōsaka Shinmachi nerimono), a set of identifying portraits of Osaka geisha and courtesans dressed for the quarter's festival.

Beyond surimono, Shigenobu was a prolific illustrator of woodblock-printed books, providing designs for kyōka anthologies and for ehon (illustrated picture books). His bijin-ga, when he turned to fashionable feminine portraiture, are notably refined, rendered with the cooler, more linear handling characteristic of the Hokusai studio.

Shigenobu died in 1832 (Tenpō 3) at the age of forty-five, predeceasing his long-lived father-in-law, who lived until 1849. His art name passed to a pupil now usually identified as Yanagawa Shigenobu II, whose surimono are stylistically close to the first Shigenobu's and have sometimes been confused with them in the older literature; modern museum cataloguing distinguishes the two with the I/II designation. Works attributed to the first Shigenobu are held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and other major museum collections. He is remembered today as a key designer of the surimono's golden moment and as an artist whose small-scale works repay the close looking that the format was designed to invite.