Ehon kagami hyakushu (vol. 2)

Ehon kagami hyakushu (vol. 2), a woodblock-printed book of approximately 1752-1753 (Hōreki 2-3) in the Art Institute of Chicago, is a companion volume to the museum's other Ehon kagami hyakushu impressions and forms part of Nishikawa Suketada's most important publishing project of his early career as workshop head. The hundred-poem structure of the parent series allowed Suketada to organize a long sequence of figural compositions around an inherited literary armature, a strategy his father had used to enormous commercial and cultural effect across nearly four decades of Kyoto ehon production. The Art Institute's holding of multiple volumes from this title is unusual in Western collections and provides comparative material for the study of Suketada's hand at a moment when he was both consolidating and extending the Nishikawa visual vocabulary. The figures are rendered in the spare monochrome sumizuri-e style characteristic of pre-[nishiki-e](/glossary/nishiki-e) Kyoto print production — no separate color blocks, no hand-applied coloring, just the supple printed contour line carrying the entire visual weight of the composition.