Ehon kagami hyakushu, 2nd Series

Ehon kagami hyakushu, 2nd Series, a woodblock-printed book of approximately 1752-1753 (Hōreki 2-3) in the Art Institute of Chicago, is the designated second installment of one of Nishikawa Suketada's most important publications — the 'Picture Book: Mirror of a Hundred Poems,' which draws on the classical Hyakunin isshu poetic anthology compiled by Fujiwara no Teika in the thirteenth century. The Hyakunin isshu had served as a foundational reference text for Japanese literary education for centuries by Suketada's time, and illustrated editions of its hundred poems and hundred poets were a major Kyoto and Edo publishing category. Suketada's contribution to this tradition extends the visual approach his father Nishikawa Sukenobu had used in his own Hyakunin isshu-themed ehon: contemporary Kyoto figures rendered in a supple monochrome line, placed in compositional frames that allowed each poet's verse to be paired with a sympathetic figural depiction. The early 1750s date places the book in the Hōreki era and in the immediate aftermath of Sukenobu's death in 1750, when Suketada had assumed the leadership of the family workshop. As a second-series volume, the work also demonstrates the commercial commitment of the Kyoto publishing house behind it, which evidently judged the first series successful enough to warrant continuation.