Weaving silk, plate 11 from the series "Silkworm Cultivation (Kaiko yashinai gusa)"

Plate 11 from the series Silkworm Cultivation (Kaiko yashinai gusa) shows the weaving stage of the silk production cycle, the final scene in Katsukawa Shunsho's collaborative project documenting the labor of sericulture. The series, published around 1772, was a notable departure from the yakusha-e for which Shunsho was best known, depicting women at the patient work of raising silkworms, reeling thread from cocoons, and weaving the finished cloth on a treadle loom. The print is held in the Art Institute of Chicago and dated by the museum to 1767. Sericulture had a long iconographic tradition in Chinese painting, transmitted to Japan through Tang and Song models, and Shunsho's Edo ukiyo-e treatment domesticates that tradition for an urban audience of the eighteenth century. The figures wear contemporary dress, the architectural setting is a recognizable Japanese house, and the technical accuracy of the loom argues that the artist either observed weaving directly or worked from accurate models. The Katsukawa school is not generally associated with kacho-e or genre-process series of this kind, and Kaiko Yashinai-gusa documents Shunsho's range beyond the actor print. The series also speaks to the prosperity of the silk industry in mid-Edo Japan and the contemporary interest in showing women at productive labor, a theme that would resurface across late eighteenth-century bijin-ga and beyond.