Sumo Wrestlers of the Eastern Group: Kurateyama Yadayû and Izumigawa Rin’emon

Katsukawa Shunsho's portrait of the sumo wrestlers Kurateyama Yadayu and Izumigawa Rin'emon of the Eastern Group, dated around 1775, shows the Edo ukiyo-e master extending his interests beyond the kabuki stage to the parallel spectacle of professional sumo. The eighteenth century saw sumo become a major commercial entertainment in Edo, with formal tournaments, ranked wrestlers grouped into Eastern and Western teams, and a printed culture of banzuke rankings and individual portraits that mirrored the printed culture of kabuki. Shunsho was among the first ukiyo-e artists to develop sumo-e as a sustained genre, and the Katsukawa school would remain a leading workshop for sumo prints into the nineteenth century. In this Art Institute of Chicago sheet, the two wrestlers are presented in a sober, frontal arrangement, their massive bodies described with the Katsukawa school's typical attention to physical individuality. Just as Shunsho's yakusha-e refused generic actor types in favor of recognizable likeness, his sumo-e refused generic wrestler bodies in favor of specific Kurateyama Yadayu and specific Izumigawa Rin'emon, each named in the print itself. The Eastern Group designation places them within the formal tournament structure that organized professional sumo, and the print likely circulated as a fan keepsake among Edo's sumo aficionados. Within Shunsho's broader Edo ukiyo-e oeuvre, sumo prints offered both a complementary subject to kabuki and a related challenge of portraiture: how to render a public hero so that admirers could recognize him at sight. The sheet provides early and influential evidence of how the Katsukawa school answered that challenge.