Takenouchi no Sukune carrying the Emperor Ojin

Totoya Hokkei composed this surimono around 1825, illustrating an episode from one of the most enduring legends of early Japanese history: the loyal minister Takenouchi no Sukune carrying the infant Emperor Ojin. According to tradition, Takenouchi served five successive sovereigns and was credited with extraordinary longevity, becoming a symbol of unwavering devotion to the throne. The image of the elderly statesman bearing the future emperor encapsulates the Confucian and Shinto values that the Tokugawa regime promoted, and it remained a favored subject in popular prints throughout the Edo period. Hokkei composes the scene with the figural compression characteristic of surimono, balancing the bearded minister against the small imperial child with restrained dignity. As a senior pupil of Katsushika Hokusai and a leading member of the Hokusai school, Totoya Hokkei was particularly esteemed for his surimono, the privately commissioned deluxe prints that combined striking images with kyoka poems on heavy paper enriched by metallic pigments and embossing. By the mid-1820s, Hokkei had built a substantial practice supplying designs to poetry clubs in Edo, and his treatment of legendary subjects helped establish the iconographic conventions that later artists would inherit. The Art Institute of Chicago preserves this impression among its holdings of nineteenth-century Japanese prints. The technical refinements visible in the work, the careful color registration, the embossed details on robes, the use of gold and silver pigments, all reflect the heightened production standards that distinguished surimono from ordinary commercial prints and made them prized collector's items both during the Edo period and in modern Western collections.