The Sumo Wrestler Kurogumo Otozô with the Teahouse Waitress Naniwa Okita

Held by the Art Institute of Chicago and dated to the early 1790s, this print captures one of the celebrity pairings of late-eighteenth-century Edo: the sumo wrestler Kurogumo Otozō towering beside the teahouse waitress Naniwa Okita, herself a famous beauty whose likeness was distributed across the city's print market. Shun'ei, building on the foundations laid by his teacher Shunshō, was among the most accomplished sumo print artists of the Kansei era, and this composition demonstrates the dramatic possibilities of pairing massive wrestlers with the slender, fashionable figures of the day's bijin (beautiful women). The juxtaposition is theatrical in its own way: Otozō's bulk fills the sheet, his powerful musculature rendered with characteristically firm Katsukawa outlining, while Okita stands beside him in elaborate teahouse attire, her hair arrangement and kimono pattern delicately differentiated against the wrestler's solidity. The convergence of sumo and bijin-ga subjects in a single print also reflects a broader Edo phenomenon — the city's culture of celebrity, in which sumo wrestlers, kabuki actors, and famous tea-shop waitresses occupied overlapping space in popular imagination. For modern viewers, the print preserves the visual texture of a specific moment in Edo's celebrity culture, captured by an artist who understood how to make scale itself eloquent.