Ono no Komachi, from A Set of Three Beauties (Bijin sanpukutsui)

Dated to circa the 1720s and held in the Art Institute of Chicago, this hand-coloured urushi-e hosoban is the right sheet of a three-sheet triptych titled A Set of Three Beauties (Bijin sanpukutsui), in which Shigenobu reimagined the classical poetess Ono no Komachi (834-880) as a contemporary Edo beauty in the fashionable dress and bearing of the early Kyoho era. The mitate (parody or transposition) device, in which classical literary figures were costumed and posed in the dress of the present day, was a foundational rhetorical strategy of early-eighteenth-century ukiyo-e and connected the urbane audience of the print trade to the canonical poetic and literary inheritance of the Heian and Kamakura periods. Komachi, one of the Rokkasen (Six Poetic Sages) of the early Heian classical anthologies and a perennial subject of waka poetry, painting, and theatrical performance, here appears stripped of her historical robes and re-presented as a beauty of the present moment, an iconographic move that anchored the bijinga genre within the broader cultural project of vernacular reception of the classical past. The hosoban triptych format, with the three sheets coordinated to read together as a single bijin-sanpukutsui (three-beauty set), demonstrates Shigenobu's command of multi-sheet composition, while the urushi-e finish documents his early career engagement with the refined hand-colouring techniques of the period. As an early Shigenobu work, the print contributes to the chronology of his artistic development and to the documentation of the mitate convention in the early-Edo bijinga tradition.