"Ho": Yatsuhashi Bridge in Mikawa Province, from the series "Tales of Ise in Fashionable Brocade Pictures (Furyu nishiki-e Ise monogatari)"

Plate Ho, Yatsuhashi Bridge in Mikawa Province, from Katsukawa Shunsho's series Tales of Ise in Fashionable Brocade Pictures (Furyu nishiki-e Ise monogatari) illustrates one of the most celebrated episodes of the tenth-century Ise monogatari, in which the protagonist crosses the eight-plank Yatsuhashi bridge in Mikawa and, prompted by the irises blooming in the marsh below, composes the famous acrostic poem on Kakitsubata. Held in the Art Institute of Chicago and produced in the late 1760s, the print belongs to Shunsho's iroha-ordered classical literary suite. The Yatsuhashi scene became one of the great recurring subjects of Japanese visual culture, treated in painting from the Heian period onward and famously elaborated by Ogata Korin in screen format in the early eighteenth century. Shunsho's nishiki-e version transposes the scene into the furyu manner of mid-Edo ukiyo-e, the figures dressed in contemporary kimono and the bridge and irises rendered in the new full-color polychrome technique that had been perfected in Edo only a few years earlier. While Katsukawa school renown rested chiefly on Shunsho's yakusha-e, the Furyu nishiki-e Ise monogatari demonstrates his command of classical narrative and his ability to address one of the most iconographically charged subjects in the Japanese tradition with fresh visual intelligence.