Still-Life with Monkey Mask

Still-Life with Monkey Mask exemplifies Totoya Hokkei's gift for compact emblem-like compositions designed to function as visual puzzles for kyōka poets. A monkey mask, the kind used in folk performances and New Year sarumawashi entertainments, is paired with a small arrangement of seasonal objects, each of them carrying associations that an Edo kyoka-e audience would have read with ease. The monkey was the zodiac animal for selected years and was widely associated with protection, good fortune, and warding off illness; combined with auspicious props it formed a perfect surimono subject for a poetry group's New Year exchange. Hokkei trained under Hokusai after his earlier work with the Kanō school, and that hybrid background shaped his particular still-life manner: disciplined drawing of objects, attention to texture, and an almost tactile sense of placement. The Art Institute of Chicago holds the sheet within its broad early-nineteenth-century surimono collection, where Hokkei's still lifes appear repeatedly as examples of how Hokusai school designers used small object arrangements to compress reference and humor. The print also speaks to the wider history of surimono itself, in which still life — a relatively minor mode in commercial ukiyo-e — became a central genre because of its suitability for visual punning and quiet luxury production. Image courtesy of the Art Institute of Chicago.