Act Eleven: Night Raid on Moronao's Mansion from the play Chushingura (Treasury of Forty-seven Loyal Retainers)

Katsukawa Shunei's Act Eleven from Kanadehon Chushingura depicts the climactic night raid on the mansion of Ko no Moronao by the forty-seven loyal retainers of the slain lord Enya Hangan, the culmination of the entire play. After almost two years of feigned dissipation by their leader Oboshi Yuranosuke, the retainers gather in the snow before dawn, force the mansion gate, fight their way through Moronao's household guard, and at last drag the cowering official from his hiding place to claim the head with which they will avenge their master. Shunei composes the scene with multiple armored figures in the snow-bound forecourt, the wintry setting rendered in passages of restrained [bokashi](/glossary/bokashi) and the action distributed across the sheet. As the culminating image of his eleven-act Chushingura suite, this print provided Edo collectors with the most narratively charged installment of the series and rounded out a complete printed record of the play. As the senior pupil of Katsukawa Shunsho, Shunei extended the Katsukawa school's commitment to individualized actor portraiture into multi-figure narrative composition, producing in this suite some of his most ambitious work and demonstrating that kabuki actor prints could be made to carry full narrative weight. This impression is preserved in the Art Institute of Chicago, where it can be studied beside the other ten acts of Shunei's Chushingura cycle.