"Ha": Guards at the "Love Passage," from the series "Tales of Ise in Fashionable Brocade Pictures (Furyu nishiki-e Ise monogatari)"

Plate Ha, Guards at the Love Passage, from Katsukawa Shunsho's series Tales of Ise in Fashionable Brocade Pictures (Furyu nishiki-e Ise monogatari) illustrates an episode from the tenth-century Ise monogatari concerning lovers thwarted by sentries posted at a courtyard passageway. Held in the Art Institute of Chicago and dated to the late 1760s, the print belongs to Shunsho's most ambitious early series in nishiki-e, the polychrome brocade printing technique that had been newly perfected in Edo. The image transposes the Heian setting into the furyu manner of contemporary mid-Edo ukiyo-e, the figures redressed in eighteenth-century kimono and the architectural elements reworked into recognizable Edo interiors. While Katsukawa school renown rested chiefly on Shunsho's yakusha-e, this series demonstrates his command of the classical literary register and his fluency with the refined bijin idiom that the Ise tales demanded. The iroha-ordered suite invited collectors to acquire the complete set, each plate keyed to a Japanese syllable. The Furyu nishiki-e Ise monogatari is among the most important of Shunsho's non-actor Edo ukiyo-e projects and remains a touchstone for understanding the breadth of his career beyond the kabuki theater commissions that produced the bulk of his output.