Oboshi Yuranosuke at the Ichiriki Teahouse, from scene VII in the Storehouse of Loyal Retainers

From the Art Institute of Chicago, this large oban triptych (right and center sheets surviving) depicts Oboshi Yuranosuke at the Ichiriki Teahouse, the climactic scene from Act VII of Kanadehon Chushingura - the puppet-and-kabuki dramatization of the forty-seven ronin revenge story that was one of the most popular subjects in late-Edo visual culture. The scene shows Yuranosuke, leader of the loyal retainers, conducting his elaborate masquerade of dissolution at the Gion teahouse in order to throw the enemy's spies off his trail. Shunman's treatment is more refined and less theatrical than the Kabuki-derived prints of his contemporaries like Sharaku or the Toyokuni line: rather than emphasize the actors' faces or melodramatic gesture, he treats the scene as a courtesan-house bijin-ga, foregrounding the women of the teahouse and rendering Yuranosuke as part of an elegant interior tableau. This decision reflects Shunman's persistent inclination toward the literary and the decorative over the theatrical. The triptych format gives the composition room to breathe, with architectural framing devices and screens compartmentalizing the picture in ways that encourage the eye to wander through the interior. As one of relatively few kabuki-themed prints in Shunman's surviving oeuvre, the Ichiriki Teahouse triptych documents his fluency in narrative imagery even as his temperament inclined toward private rather than public subjects. The Art Institute of Chicago preserves two of the three original sheets.