Act Two: The Quarters of Momonoi Wakasanosuke from the play Chushingura (Treasury of the Forty-seven Loyal Retainers)

Katsukawa Shunei's woodblock print of Act Two: The Quarters of Momonoi Wakasanosuke from the play Chushingura (Treasury of the Forty-seven Loyal Retainers), dated to around 1790, belongs to a sequence depicting episodes from the most enduring of all Edo-period theatrical narratives. The Chushingura cycle dramatizes the historical revenge of the forty-seven ronin, and its scenes were staged annually in the kabuki and puppet theaters of Edo and Osaka. In this episode, the hot-headed lord Wakasanosuke broods in his residence over insults received at the shogun's palace, setting up the moral crux that drives the wider tragedy. Shunei, a leading figure of the Katsukawa school in late eighteenth-century Edo ukiyo-e, places the figures within an interior framed by sliding screens and verandas, using restrained colour to focus attention on costume patterning and gesture. Although best known for single-sheet yakusha-e portraits of named actors, Shunei here works in a more narrative mode that brings the Katsukawa idiom into dialogue with the illustrated drama books that circulated alongside kabuki performance. The print preserves a record of how Edo audiences imagined the play's domestic scenes between its more famous setpieces. Held in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago, this sheet is documented at https://www.artic.edu/artworks/32471 and provides a window into Shunei's range beyond the bust portraits for which he was most celebrated.