Dalliance

This circa 1685 hand-colored oban sumizuri-e in the Art Institute of Chicago, attributed to Sugimura Jihei, depicts an intimate moment between two figures in the manner of his signed shunga sheets, though the absence of an artist's signature on the work has led to its catalog status as an "attributed to" rather than a directly authored print. The persistent attribution problem in Sugimura's corpus is exemplified here: the work shares the compositional logic, the figural type, the textile patterning, and the hand-coloring conventions of his signed shunga, yet without the securing inscription it cannot be definitively assigned to his hand against the broader Genroku field of related artists working in the same idiom. Museum scholarship has placed it within his corpus based on careful stylistic analysis, but the cataloging acknowledges the limit of that judgment. Printed in single-block black ink in the standard oban format and subsequently hand-colored with tan and additional mineral pigments, the work is representative of the broader Genroku shunga tradition that Sugimura helped to define alongside Hishikawa Moronobu and other contemporaries. Its presence in the Clarence Buckingham Collection at the Art Institute of Chicago documents the early Western connoisseurship that began the long scholarly project of distinguishing the Sugimura hand from the broader Moronobu-circle output of late seventeenth-century Edo.