The Annoucement, page from "A Picture Book of Stage Fans (Ehon butai ogi)"

This sheet, conserved at the Art Institute of Chicago, is the announcement page from Ehon Butai Ogi (A Picture Book of Stage Fans), the celebrated illustrated book that Katsukawa Shunsho produced jointly with Ippitsusai Buncho around 1770. The publication, issued in three volumes by the Edo bookseller Kariganeya, gathered idealized portraits of leading kabuki actors framed within the silhouette of a folding fan, the ogi, an object that itself carried associations with the stage. Ehon Butai Ogi marked a turning point for yakusha-e and for the Katsukawa school: by binding individualized actor likenesses into a luxury book rather than scattering them across single-sheet prints, Shunsho and Buncho asserted that Edo ukiyo-e portraiture could rival the dignity of the painted hanging scroll. The announcement page, with its typeset preface and ornamental framing, addressed an audience of educated theater connoisseurs and signaled the project's ambition. For Shunsho specifically, the book consolidated the reputation he had been building through hosoban prints and prepared the ground for the flood of yakusha-e his studio would issue throughout the 1770s. Its survival within institutional collections allows scholars to trace how the Katsukawa school positioned itself relative to earlier Torii-school traditions of stage imagery.