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

Plate Ku from Katsukawa Shunsho's series Tales of Ise in Fashionable Brocade Pictures (Furyu nishiki-e Ise monogatari) is held in the Art Institute of Chicago and dates from the late 1760s. The series adapts episodes of the tenth-century Ise monogatari into the furyu manner of mid-Edo ukiyo-e, the Heian protagonists redressed in contemporary kimono and the action shifted into the recognizable interiors and exteriors of the eighteenth-century city. Each plate of the iroha-ordered suite is keyed to a syllable of the traditional Japanese pangram, inviting collectors to assemble the complete set. While Katsukawa school renown was built on Shunsho's yakusha-e, the Furyu nishiki-e Ise monogatari demonstrates his command of the classical literary register and the bijin idiom, complementing the actor prints that constituted the bulk of his Edo ukiyo-e output. The series belongs to the same late-1760s moment in which Suzuki Harunobu was establishing the nishiki-e polychrome printing technique at its most refined, and Shunsho's contribution shows him absorbing and extending the new technology in a project of literary ambition. The Art Institute of Chicago holds an unusually deep run of plates from the series, and the present plate stands within that strong holding as a representative example of Shunsho's classical narrative practice.