Travelers in Snow

Held by the Art Institute of Chicago under accession number 1939.872 and dated to the early nineteenth century, Travelers in Snow is a horizontal color woodblock print by Katsukawa Shunsen (Shunkō II, 1762–c. 1830). The composition depicts travelers in a winter landscape — a subject category that became increasingly important in late-Edo [ukiyo-e](/glossary/ukiyo-e) as the print market expanded its interest in landscape and travel imagery during the Bunka and Bunsei eras (1804–1830). Shunsen worked in this register alongside his better-known bijin and actor prints, and the Travelers in Snow can be read as part of the broader pre-Hiroshige tradition of woodblock snow landscapes that would culminate in the celebrated Hiroshige snow views of the 1830s. The print's horizontal format — unusual for ukiyo-e of the period, which favored vertical formats for single-figure compositions — and its muted palette of greys, whites, and dark ink lines situate it within the small but distinctive body of Katsukawa-school landscape work that emerged in the early nineteenth century. The AIC's impression entered the collection through the Frederick W. Gookin bequest, and like the Gookin Flower (Hana), it is one of the firmly attributed Shunsen (Shunkō II) holdings at the museum and a useful counterweight to the dominant actor-print emphasis of the Katsukawa school's earlier eighteenth-century output.