Dance Interlude “The Wife from Shinoda Forest" (“Shinodazuma”) in “Mirror of Ashiya Dôman and Ôuchi” (“Dôman Ôuchi kagami”), from the series Designs for Patchwork Pictures (Oshie-gata)

Katsukawa Shunei's print of the dance interlude Shinodazuma, the Wife from Shinoda Forest, from the play Doman Ouchi Kagami, belongs to a series titled Oshie-gata, Designs for Patchwork Pictures. The series is unusual among Shunei's output because each design was intended to function not only as a freestanding print but as a model for fabric-and-paper raised collages, an Edo craft tradition popular with women and children. Shinodazuma is the kabuki dance version of the legend of the fox spirit Kuzunoha, who marries a man and bears him a son before being forced back to her wild form, a story that pivots on the central conceit of supernatural disguise and elegiac farewell. Shunei renders the figure in flowing courtly attire, the pose anchored in the classic dance gesture, the face given the individualized likeness for which the Katsukawa school's Edo yakusha-e was prized. By presenting kabuki actor prints in a format adapted for craft reproduction, the Oshie-gata series extended the reach of theatrical imagery into the household and adapted the Katsukawa school's stage portraiture to a craft market. As Katsukawa Shunsho's leading pupil, Shunei used such series to test the elastic boundary between actor print, dance image, and decorative design. This impression in the Art Institute of Chicago is one of the museum's notable holdings of Shunei's serial work.