"He": Mt. Fuji, Suruga Province, from the series "Tales of Ise in Fashionable Brocade Pictures (Furyu nishiki-e Ise monogatari)"

Plate He from Katsukawa Shunsho's series Tales of Ise in Fashionable Brocade Pictures (Furyu nishiki-e Ise monogatari) depicts the Mount Fuji episode of the Ise monogatari, set in Suruga Province. Held in the Art Institute of Chicago and produced in the late 1760s, the print belongs to one of Shunsho's most ambitious early series in nishiki-e, the full-color brocade printing technique that had been perfected only a few years earlier in Edo. The Mount Fuji passage of the Ise tales famously contains the poem about snow falling on Fuji in summer, the protagonist marveling at the spectacle from the foot of the mountain as he journeys eastward. Shunsho condenses the literary episode into a visual scene that combines the recognizable silhouette of Fuji with figures dressed in the furyu fashion of mid-Edo, the contemporary recasting that was the series' organizing conceit. While Katsukawa school renown rested on Shunsho's yakusha-e, this Ise monogatari project demonstrates his interest in classical narrative and his command of an iconography quite distinct from the actor print. The series is iroha-ordered, each plate keyed to a Japanese syllable, and the iroha numbering invited collectors to acquire the full set. The Furyu nishiki-e Ise monogatari is among the most important of Shunsho's non-actor Edo ukiyo-e projects.