Tokaiji no Bansho, from the series "Shinagawa Hakkei (Eight Views of Shinagawa)"

Katsukawa Shunsho's 'Tokaiji no Bansho' belongs to his 'Shinagawa Hakkei' (Eight Views of Shinagawa) series, in which the classical Chinese 'Eight Views' tradition is reimagined for an Edo audience around the famous post-station of Shinagawa on the Tokaido. Tokaiji, the temple referenced in the title, was a prominent religious site in the area, and the 'Evening Bell' theme of the canonical Eight Views set is here transposed to the sound of the Tokaiji bell. The series exemplifies the Edo period taste for mitate, in which Chinese poetic and pictorial conventions were translated into specifically Japanese locations, providing both a learned reference and a recognizable contemporary scene for print collectors. Shunsho's design, made in the mid-1760s when nishiki-e printing was rapidly maturing, demonstrates his fluency in landscape and figure composition outside the yakusha-e for which he is most celebrated. The Katsukawa school under Shunsho's leadership was unusually flexible in this respect, willing to engage with bijin-ga, meisho-e, and mitate work alongside its dominant actor portrait business. The Art Institute of Chicago preserves the impression as part of its broad survey of Katsukawa school output and as a representative document of Edo ukiyo-e's enthusiasm for series formats that combined classical reference and local geography. As such, the print also stands as an important antecedent for the great landscape series that Hokusai and Hiroshige would produce a few decades later.