Settan kigū

Held by the Art Institute of Chicago and dated 1803, Settan kigū is a five-volume woodblock-printed book illustrated by Katsukawa Shunzan. The 1803 publication date places this work in the later phase of Shunzan's career, after the conventional 1798 end-date that some catalogers assign to his single-sheet print activity, and confirms that he remained active as a book illustrator into the early nineteenth century. Illustrated books were a central component of late Edo commercial publishing: the yomihon (reading books), kibyōshi (yellow-cover books), and gōkan (combined picture-books) ecosystems supplied Edo readers with a rich variety of fiction, history, and popular literature, and the most successful ukiyo-e designers regularly worked across both single-sheet prints and printed books. Many late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century book commissions involved multi-volume sets — three, five, or six volumes was typical — with the woodblock-printing operation distributing the labor of carving across multiple craftsmen working under the designer's supervision. The Art Institute of Chicago's five-volume Settan kigū preserves a substantial late example of Shunzan's printed-book output and provides a valuable counterweight to the single-sheet yakusha-e and bijin-ga that constitute the better-known portion of his oeuvre.