Ehon Tekagami (An Illustrated Book of Model Paintings)

Ehon Tekagami (絵本手鑑, "An Illustrated Book of Model Paintings," literally "Illustrated Hand Mirror of Pictures") is the first and most influential of Ōoka Shunboku's printed painting manuals, a six-volume woodblock-printed compendium published in Osaka in Kyōho 5 (1720) by the publisher Bunkidō. The Art Institute of Chicago copy (accession 2022.836, Frederick W. Gookin Collection) is catalogued without a specific date but corresponds to one of the eighteenth-century printings of Shunboku's original 1720 edition. The book's title plays on the term tekagami — a hand mirror — and announces its purpose: each page reflects the characteristic style of a named master, so that a reader could study Sesshū, Kano Motonobu, Hasegawa Tōhaku, and a long roster of Chinese painters in a single portable volume. The Chicago copy preserves the small hanshibon page format (27 by 18 centimeters) and the carefully attributed reproductions that made Shunboku's ehon a key vehicle for the diffusion of the Kano academic tradition outside elite workshops. As the first of his books to demonstrate the formula on this scale, Ehon Tekagami established the model that Shunboku would extend across the rest of his career and that publishers would continue to reprint long after his death in 1763.