Writing Implements and Seals

Writing Implements and Seals, a horizontal chuban surimono in the Art Institute of Chicago and dated to 1799 or 1811, is one of Shunman's most pristine still-life surimono. The image arranges writing brushes, an inkstone, paper, and several carved seals on a table or matting, treating the literary tools of the kyoka poet with the same iconographic seriousness that Western still-life painters applied to flowers and skulls. The objects are rendered with exceptional precision, almost certainly with blind embossing emphasizing the contours of the inkstone, the seal-cuts, and the brush handles. The horizontal chuban format - a smaller, landscape-orientation sheet - is unusual in the surimono tradition and gives the composition a tablecloth-like display quality, the objects arrayed along a horizontal axis with deliberate spatial care. For a kyoka circle, an image of writing implements is virtually a self-portrait of the group's activity: these are the tools that produced the verses inscribed around the image, and the print thereby enacts the conditions of its own creation. Shunman's still-life surimono are arguably the most concentrated expressions of the surimono aesthetic, eliminating figural and narrative content almost entirely in favor of pure object-contemplation, and this print is among the finest of the genre. The Art Institute of Chicago's preservation of the print with full color and embossing intact is especially valuable, since surimono of this delicacy degrade easily.