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 at the heart of the Hokusai studio during the years when his teacher was producing the Hokusai Manga, and he is now regarded as one of the most important non-Hokusai surimono masters of his generation alongside Kubo Shunman, Totoya Hokkei, and Teisai Hokuba.

He was born in Edo in 1787 (Tenmei 7). His original family name was Suzuki — he is recorded in early sources as Suzuki Shigenobu — and he adopted the surname Yanagawa from the Yanagawa-chō district of Edo where he eventually lived and worked. The details of his early training are imperfectly documented, but it is clear that he entered Hokusai's circle as a young man and progressed quickly through the studio ranks. He used several gō (art names) over the course of his career, including Rinsai (柳齋) and Yanagawa; 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.

Around 1812 Shigenobu married Hokusai's eldest daughter, O-Miyo (also given as Omiyo). The marriage cemented his place inside the studio, but it did not last. Hokusai was a famously difficult father-in-law: by the early 1820s the marriage had broken down, and O-Miyo had returned to her father's household, where she would remain for the rest of her life and where her younger sister Ōi (later the painter Katsushika Ōi) would also live. The traditional explanation — preserved in nineteenth-century Edo gossip — is that Hokusai's restless, peripatetic, indifferent-to-domestic-comfort household was an impossible environment for a daughter-in-law and that frictions accumulated between father-in-law and son-in-law, ending in divorce. Whatever the precise circumstances, Shigenobu continued to work in the broader Hokusai orbit afterward, and his work of the mid- and late 1820s remains 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, individual patrons, or merchant houses to mark New Year's or accompany privately circulated poems. Surimono were printed in small editions on the finest hōsho paper, embellished with karazuri (blind embossing), metallic pigments, and lavish use of mica, and they carried one or more kyōka verses alongside an image that played pictorially against the poem's theme. The shikishiban format — a roughly square sheet of about 20 by 18 centimeters — was the standard surimono shape during Shigenobu's most productive decade. The mid- and late 1820s produced his finest sequences, including contributions to A Comparison of Flowers (Hana awase), Five Prints on Longevity (Kotobuki goban no uchi), and the celebrated Costume Parade of the Shinmachi Quarter in Osaka (Ōsaka Shinmachi nerimono) — a series of identifying portraits of Osaka geisha and courtesans dressed for the famous quarterly festival.