Madam Tang (Jp: To Fujin), from the series "Twenty-four Paragons of Filial Piety (Nijushiko)"

Totoya Hokkei's surimono of Madam Tang (Jp: To Fujin), part of his series Twenty-four Paragons of Filial Piety (Nijushiko), is dated 1820 in the Art Institute of Chicago's catalogue. The Nijushiko cycle, drawn from a Chinese moral compendium widely known in Japan, offered Edo kyoka-e clubs a learned, classicizing framework for commissioning sets of surimono. Madam Tang is celebrated in this tradition for breastfeeding her infirm mother-in-law when the elder woman could no longer chew food, an act of devotion that became one of the cycle's most poignant exemplars. Hokkei, a senior pupil of the Hokusai school, was particularly suited to such a project: his careful figural drawing and his familiarity with Chinese subject matter, both inherited from Katsushika Hokusai's deep interest in continental sources, allowed him to render the paragons with appropriate gravity. Issuing the cycle as a surimono series would have given a kyoka club the opportunity to compose verses on each paragon and to circulate the prints among members and friends, who valued such sets for their literary and didactic content as much as for their visual refinement. The Art Institute of Chicago's impression preserves Hokkei's contribution to one of the most ambitious surimono series of its era, a model of how the Hokusai school engaged with the moralized history of East Asia within Edo kyoka-e culture.