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

Tsukioka Kōgyo's Izutsu, produced in 1893 for the series Pictures of No Performances (Nōgaku Zue), interprets one of the most revered plays in the Noh repertoire, attributed to Zeami and based on a celebrated episode from the Tales of Ise. The drama centers on the spirit of a woman who, as a child, measured her height against her sweetheart Ariwara no Narihira at the lip of a well; she returns as a ghost to a wandering priest, wears her dead lover's robe, and gazes into the well to glimpse his face in her own reflection. Kōgyo captures the play's atmosphere of restrained yearning through a composition that gives the figure full presence against an open ground, the costume layered with the long-sleeved chōken and the headdress that signal a woman of high rank. As one of the foremost Meiji ukiyo-e designers of Noh prints, Kōgyo was concerned not only with accurate costume and mask but with the emotional register of each play, and Izutsu's tone of nostalgic devotion finds expression in the soft handling of color and the unhurried line. He had begun his career under Tsukioka Yoshitoshi and continued under Ogata Gekkō; both teachers' influence persists in the print's careful draftsmanship. Izutsu would re-emerge in his later compendium Nōga Taikan, but the Nōgaku Zue version held by the Art Institute of Chicago belongs to the earlier moment when Kōgyo's lifelong project of documenting the classical stage in polychrome woodblock had just hit its stride.