Untitled (1740) by Nishikawa Sukenobu

An untitled print of approximately 1740 in the Victoria and Albert Museum stands as another example of a separated ehon page now circulating as a single sheet. The V&A's strong holdings of Japanese prints, built up especially in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, include a substantial body of Sukenobu material — much of it acquired before the original parent books were identified. The result is a category of museum-held Sukenobu objects, of which this untitled print is one, that survive without secure attribution to their source publication. The 1740 dating reflects the museum's stylistic assessment: a mature-period work, consistent with the Genbun-era line economy and figural proportions that define Sukenobu's late style. Even without an identified source title, the sheet functions as evidence of the Sukenobu approach — a calmly observed female figure rendered in fluent monochrome line, with the kind of compositional restraint that marks the entire Kyoto bijin-ga tradition. As the Edo nishiki-e revolution would soon transform the market for printed images of women, sheets like this one preserve the visual language that immediately preceded — and made possible — that transformation.