Dontaro (Kyogen), from the series "Pictures of No Performances (Nogaku Zue)"

Tsukioka Kogyo's Dontaro (Kyogen), from the series Pictures of No Performances (Nogaku Zue), is a Meiji woodblock print dated 1893 and held in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago. The print belongs to the portion of the Nogaku Zue project that documents kyogen, the comic interludes that share the noh stage and supply its lighter register. Dontaro is among the kyogen pieces that turn on the entanglements of two wives, a country husband and his attempts to manage them, and the play unfolds through the mistaken loyalties and rough comedy characteristic of the form. Kogyo's noh-e treatment of the kyogen retains the formal vocabulary of the noh stage while reflecting the lighter character of the comic mode. The figures appear in the patterned costumes of the kyogen actors, posed against the bare planks and painted pine of the stage they share with the noh. As Tsukioka Yoshitoshi's pupil, Kogyo brought the strict figure drawing of the late [ukiyo-e](/glossary/ukiyo-e) tradition to his career as the leading visual chronicler of the classical stage, and his line work here shows that discipline applied to a comic subject. The Nogaku Zue series, pursued across the 1890s, drew on direct observation of performances and on cooperation with the great schools then reconstructing the art under Meiji patronage. The carving renders the textile patterns with patient detail, and the printing maintains the muted ground appropriate to performance documentation. The Art Institute of Chicago documents this impression.