Puppeteers - A Set of Three (Ayatsuri sanpukutsui)

Listed by the Art Institute of Chicago as a color woodblock print in uncut hosoban triptych format and benizuri-e classification dated to around 1752, this image is the complete Ayatsuri sanpukutsui or Puppeteers - A Set of Three. The uncut state, with all three hosoban sheets printed on a single piece of paper rather than separated for individual sale, is an important survival because it documents the way the triptych was originally conceived as a continuous compositional field even though it was designed to be cut and read as three discrete sheets. Ishikawa Toyonobu used the sanpukutsui structure repeatedly to organize his beauties and his actors into coordinated tableaux, and this set, devoted to puppeteers and their puppets, takes up one of the most generative meta-theatrical themes available to him: the performer of performers, the human animator of figures who themselves stage a fiction. Benizuri-e classification confirms the use of two or three printed color blocks supplying rose pink and grass green over the black-line printing. The Art Institute holding of the uncut state is an essential document of Toyonobu's triptych practice and of mid-Edo puppetry iconography in its full original configuration.