Santô Kyôden at a Daimyo's Mansion

This unusual print depicts the artist's own literary alter ego — the writer Santō Kyōden — visiting a daimyō's mansion, a fictional scene that plays on the gap between Kyōden's public persona as an urbane Edo townsman writer and the formal world of high samurai households. Kitao Masanobu and Santō Kyōden were the same man: the print designer of the Kitao school who, by the mid-1780s, was already more famous as the author of kibyōshi and sharebon than as a maker of Edo [bijin-ga](/glossary/bijin-ga) or Yoshiwara portraits. To make a print of himself entering a daimyō's residence is partly a piece of self-promotion and partly a wry commentary on the social distances of late-Edo culture, in which fashionable writers and high-ranking warriors could in fact share a literary world. The figure dressed as Kyōden is drawn with the same calm, oval face Masanobu gave his bijin, and the architectural setting is rendered in the schematic interior style that the artist's late-eighteenth-century contemporaries favored. The print is now in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and is valued less for its technical bravura than for its biographical interest: it is one of the few surviving images in which Masanobu the print artist openly stages Kyōden the writer as his own subject.