A Romantic Scene

A Romantic Scene is a surimono by Totoya Hokkei, a Hokusai school designer of privately commissioned prints in early nineteenth-century Edo. The composition shows a pair of figures, a man and a woman, in close proximity and exchanging looks or words that suggest an amorous encounter. Hokkei treats the scene with the polite indirection characteristic of nineteenth-century surimono, focusing on the elegantly patterned robes, the carefully arranged hair, and the close angle of the heads rather than on overtly erotic incident. The figural format and the small scale of the sheet identify the print as a poetry-club commission, the romantic theme providing material for kyoka verses inscribed alongside the image. The kyoka tradition delighted in wit and double meaning, and a romantic vignette of this kind would have prompted verses that played on classical love poetry, on conventions of secret meetings, or on the comic foibles of fashionable Edo society. As a surimono, the sheet would have been issued in a small private edition with metallic pigments and karazuri blind embossing, traces of which appear in the patterned textiles. Hokkei's drawing of the figures is fluid and assured, with confident outlines describing the soft fall of the robes and the controlled features of the faces. He studied directly under Katsushika Hokusai and inherited the master's interest in human-scale narrative subjects, but his figural manner is gentler and more decorative than Hokusai's. The print is preserved in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where it documents the lighter, more playful side of Hokkei's surimono output alongside his better-known still-lifes and emblematic compositions.