Perspective Pictures for The Treasure House of Loyalty

Perspective Pictures for The Treasure House of Loyalty, a holding of the Cleveland Museum of Art dated to the 1790s, is the parent catalog entry for Kitao Masayoshi's complete uki-e treatment of Kanadehon Chushingura, the canonical story of the forty-seven loyal retainers. The series uses borrowed European one-point perspective to render the eleven acts of the kabuki drama as deep architectural and landscape spaces populated by the actors of the play. As a complete narrative series in the uki-e format, Masayoshi's Treasure House of Loyalty stands as one of the most ambitious perspective-print projects of late Edo Japan, combining the geometric discipline of European-derived perspective with the strong figural tradition of the Kitao school. The series was an important commercial as well as artistic project, situating Masayoshi within the dominant kabuki narrative of the period and demonstrating his command of the perspectival mode that had become fashionable in single-sheet print design. The Cleveland Museum of Art's holdings of the series, alongside those of the Art Institute of Chicago, constitute essential American museum-side documentation of Masayoshi's perspective compositions and his place in the late eighteenth-century Edo print market.