Gaten tsūkō

Held in the Art Institute of Chicago and dated 1727, Gaten tsūkō (画典通考) is a ten-volume woodblock-printed picture manual that ranks among the most ambitious of Morikuni's e-tehon projects and the most comprehensive Kamigata painting compendium of its decade. The title — roughly "comprehensive examination of pictorial classics" — declares the book's pedagogical ambition: it gathers exemplary compositions across the full range of Kanō subject matter, from Chinese figure subjects and landscape conventions to bird-and-flower compositions and decorative motifs, and presents them in the kind of systematic, copyable form that allowed pupils, provincial painters, and amateur literati to absorb the academy's brush idiom without direct studio access. The Art Institute of Chicago's set, from the Frederick W. Gookin Collection, preserves the clean line-block impressions of an early eighteenth-century edition and demonstrates Morikuni's mature command of the printed picture-book format he was helping to define. Across its ten volumes, the book illustrates the way Morikuni redirected his Kanō training under Tsuruzawa Tanzan into the commercial Osaka publishing trade, transforming what had been a closed, lineage-internal transmission of pictorial models into a published resource available to anyone who could buy the volumes. The scale of the project — ten volumes was an unusually large commitment for a single illustrator and publisher — also signals how central such teaching manuals had become in the early eighteenth-century book market, and the role Morikuni played in establishing them as a major commercial category.