Yamauba Watching Kintaro Wrestle a Boar

Held by the Art Institute of Chicago, Yamauba Watching Kintaro Wrestle a Boar is a color woodblock surimono that draws on one of the most beloved subjects of Japanese popular culture: the legendary mountain-dwelling foster mother Yamauba and her superhuman child Kintaro, the boy-hero whose strength as a wrestler was already proverbial by the late Edo period. Shunman shows Kintaro engaged in his characteristic boar-wrestling exploit while Yamauba looks on with maternal calm. The pair was traditionally rendered by ukiyo-e designers in a wide variety of registers - tender, comic, ribald, heroic - and Shunman's treatment in the surimono format inclines toward the elegant and decorative. The boy's ruddy skin, the dappled boar, the mountain setting compressed into a few decisive gestures, and Yamauba's quiet observing presence are arranged with the spatial economy of a surimono designer aware that the kyoka poems will be inscribed above. The subject was a favorite among kyoka poets because it offered easy hooks for both auspicious imagery (Kintaro's strength and longevity) and humorous wordplay. As with most of Shunman's late surimono, the print would have been commissioned by a specific poetry circle, distributed in a small private edition with metallic pigments and embossing, and treated as a luxury object as much as an image. The Art Institute of Chicago holds it among its core surimono collection.