Ebisu- Bishamon (Kyogen), from the series "Pictures of No Performances (Nogaku Zue)"
- Date:
- 1898
- Medium:
- Color woodblock print
- Source:
- Art Institute of Chicago
Ebisu-Bishamon, included in Tsukioka Kōgyo's 1893 series Pictures of No Performances (Nōgaku Zue), departs from the solemn Noh dramas elsewhere in the series to record a kyōgen, the comic interlude that traditionally accompanies a Noh program. In this play the gods Ebisu and Bishamon both come to claim the same young woman in marriage, each touting his own attributes; the resulting contest, in which the bride must judge between them, generates the broad humor that kyōgen audiences expected. Kōgyo, working as one of the leading Meiji [ukiyo-e](/glossary/ukiyo-e) designers of Noh prints, treats the comic subject with the same documentary care he brings to the serious dramas: costumes are rendered with attention to brocade and pattern, the figures' poses correspond to the staging conventions of the form, and the absence of background follows the bare cedar back wall of the actual stage. By including kyōgen alongside Noh in Nōgaku Zue, Kōgyo signaled the comprehensive ambition of his project, which would expand a decade later into the multi-volume Nōga Taikan. He had been trained by Tsukioka Yoshitoshi and Ogata Gekkō, and the print shows both teachers' lessons in its clean line, balanced composition, and tonally controlled palette. The Art Institute of Chicago preserves this impression among the late nineteenth-century woodblocks that documented the classical Japanese performing arts during their late Meiji institutional revival.
1898/1903
Color woodblock print; left sheet of oban diptych (right: 1943.833.42a)
1898/1903
Color woodblock print
1898
Color woodblock print
1898
Color woodblock print
Ebisu- Bishamon (Kyogen), from the series "Pictures of No Performances (Nogaku Zue)" was created by Tsukioka Kōgyo (月岡耕漁) in 1898.
Ebisu- Bishamon (Kyogen), from the series "Pictures of No Performances (Nogaku Zue)" depicts theater.
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