Cho (Ryo?), from the series "Pictures of No Performances (Nogaku Zue)"

Chō Ryō, designed by Tsukioka Kōgyo in 1893 for Pictures of No Performances (Nōgaku Zue), depicts the famous Chinese legend of Zhang Liang as adapted for the Noh stage. In the play, the strategist receives a treatise on military arts from the immortal Huang Shi Gong after passing a series of tests of humility involving the retrieval of a fallen shoe from a river. Kōgyo locates a single charged moment within this narrative and translates it into a tightly composed sheet in which costume, gesture, and the bare ground of the Noh stage carry the full meaning. The plays drawn from Chinese sources were a recognized subcategory of the Noh repertoire, and Kōgyo's choice to include them in Nōgaku Zue reflects the encyclopedic ambition that would later drive his Nōga Taikan project. Within Meiji [ukiyo-e](/glossary/ukiyo-e), his Noh prints occupied a distinctive position: rather than competing with the kabuki actor prints of contemporaries such as Kunichika or with the news prints of his own teacher Yoshitoshi, Kōgyo cultivated a quieter, more documentary idiom suited to Noh's slower tempo and aristocratic associations. His training under Tsukioka Yoshitoshi and Ogata Gekkō shaped both his draftsmanship and his sense of pictorial decorum, and the resulting prints were valued by Noh schools as well as by collectors. The Art Institute of Chicago retains this Chō Ryō among its holdings of late nineteenth-century Japanese prints, where it stands as a record of one play's appearance in the classical theatrical canon as filtered through Kōgyo's exacting eye.