Ebira, from the series "One Hundred No Dramas (Nogaku hyakuban)"

Ebira, drawn from the series One Hundred Noh Dramas (Nōgaku Hyakuban) and dated 1893, shows Tsukioka Kōgyo working in parallel with his Nōgaku Zue project to record the visual world of the Noh stage at an unprecedented scale. The play Ebira, named for the quiver carried by the warrior-poet Kajiwara Genta Kagesue at the battle of Ikuta-no-Mori, is a shura mono in which his ghost returns to recount the famous moment when he tucked a flowering plum branch into his arrow case before charging into combat. Kōgyo translates this image of martial elegance into a print that holds armor, brocade, and blossom in delicate equilibrium, the warrior's pose balanced against the negative space that Noh staging treats as a positive element. As a leading designer of Meiji ukiyo-e devoted almost exclusively to Noh prints, Kōgyo built his career on the conviction that the polychrome woodblock could capture not just the look of Noh but its temperament: its slowness, its concentration, its blend of ritual and theater. He had studied with Tsukioka Yoshitoshi, whose name he took, and later with Ogata Gekkō, and the present sheet shows him integrating Yoshitoshi's narrative clarity with Gekkō's tonal subtlety. The series would feed material into Kōgyo's later magnum opus Nōga Taikan, but on its own Nōgaku Hyakuban represents a comprehensive survey of the repertoire. The Art Institute of Chicago holds this Ebira among its Meiji-era impressions, a record of one of the form's most celebrated warrior plays as filtered through Kōgyo's exacting eye.