"Ki," from the series "Tales of Ise in Fashionable Brocade Pictures (Furyu nishiki-e Ise monogatari)"

Plate Ki from Katsukawa Shunsho's series Tales of Ise in Fashionable Brocade Pictures (Furyu nishiki-e Ise monogatari) belongs to the late 1760s and is held in the Art Institute of Chicago. The series adapts the tenth-century Ise monogatari into the furyu manner of mid-Edo ukiyo-e, the Heian protagonists dressed in the kimono of the period and the settings shifted into the urban interiors of contemporary Edo. The iroha-ordered set, in which each plate is keyed to a syllable of the traditional Japanese pangram, was an ambitious early venture in nishiki-e, the full-color brocade printing technique that had been perfected only a few years earlier. While Katsukawa school renown rested chiefly on Shunsho's yakusha-e, the Furyu nishiki-e Ise monogatari demonstrates the breadth of his Edo ukiyo-e practice and his comfort with classical narrative in the bijin register. The series sits alongside Suzuki Harunobu's contemporaneous classical adaptations as evidence of the late 1760s vogue for refined literary subjects in Edo printmaking. Each plate offered the collector a compressed visual interpretation of a famous episode, and the suite as a whole functioned as a contemporary pictorial commentary on one of the foundational works of Japanese courtly literature. The Art Institute of Chicago holds an unusually strong run of plates from the series, and the present print is a representative example of Shunsho's literary practice.