Seated Guanyu Reading the Book of Chunqiu by Zuo Qiuming

Totoya Hokkei's surimono of seated Guanyu reading the Book of Chunqiu by Zuo Qiuming, dated 1820 in the Art Institute of Chicago's catalogue, addresses one of the most enduring icons of Sino-Japanese literary culture. Guanyu, the third-century general and sworn brother of Liu Bei from the late Han dynasty, was eventually venerated as a god of war and of literature; the image of him reading the Spring and Autumn Annals (Chunqiu) by Zuo Qiuming was a standard pictorial type in both China and Japan. Edo kyoka-e clubs prized classical Chinese subjects as a backdrop for their kyoka verses, and Hokkei, as a senior pupil of the Hokusai school, was well versed in such material: Katsushika Hokusai had drawn frequently on Chinese histories and legends, and his pupils inherited that engagement. The surimono format allowed the printer to translate the warrior-scholar's robes, beard and weaponry into deluxe effects of color, embossing and metallic pigments, suitable for the connoisseurs who circulated such sheets. As one of Hokkei's many Sino-Japanese figural surimono, the print stands within a broader nineteenth-century tradition that read the East Asian past as a shared cultural inheritance, played upon by Edo poets and given visual form by Hokusai-school designers like Totoya Hokkei.