Honchō gasan and Bunchō's Copy of Toba Sōjō

Honchō gasan and Bunchō's Copy of Toba Sōjō (本朝画纂・文晁臨鳥羽僧正) is a woodblock-printed book attributed to Tani Bunchō (谷文晁, 1763-1841), dated by the Art Institute of Chicago to the eighteenth-nineteenth century and held there as accession 2022.734. The title pairs two related projects: Honchō gasan, an anthology of brushwork by Japanese painters of past generations, and Bunchō's copy of work attributed to Toba Sōjō, the twelfth-century artist-priest traditionally credited with the comic animal scrolls (Chōjū-jinbutsu-giga) that stand at the head of the Japanese pictorial humor tradition. The pairing is characteristic of Bunchō's antiquarian and synthesizing temperament: as the painter who served Matsudaira Sadanobu on the ten-volume Shūko jisshu antiquarian compendium, he treated copying earlier Japanese masters as a serious scholarly activity, and printed books that gathered his copies — along with anthologies of historical brushwork — were a logical extension of that program. The Art Institute volume measures 23.5 × 16 cm in the standard hanshi format of the Edo printed book trade, and the source provides the firm attribution to Bunchō. As a printed book it sits within the same dissemination tradition as his Shazanrō Picture Book of 1816, but it points to a different facet of his practice: not the elite hanging-scroll painter, but the antiquarian editor who used woodblock publishing to anthologize and transmit earlier Japanese painting to a general nineteenth-century audience.