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

Matsuyama Tengu, designed by Tsukioka Kōgyo in 1893 for Pictures of No Performances (Nōgaku Zue), depicts a Noh play that draws on the legend of the exiled emperor Sutoku and the supernatural beings of the mountains. The play features a tengu, a long-nosed mountain spirit associated with Buddhist warning and martial prowess, and Kōgyo isolates the figure in mid-gesture against the bare ground that, in his Noh prints, stands in for the cedar back wall of the actual stage. The tengu mask, the elaborate hair, and the layered costume are rendered with the precision that allowed his prints to function as visual references for Noh students as well as as aesthetic objects in their own right. Within the broader landscape of Meiji [ukiyo-e](/glossary/ukiyo-e), Kōgyo's specialization in Noh subjects was an unusual editorial decision. While many of his contemporaries chased the diminishing market for actor prints, news prints, or modern landscapes, he tied his career to a stage tradition that had been culturally rehabilitated under imperial and aristocratic patronage, and his prints in turn helped consolidate Noh's reputation as Japan's classical high art. He had trained successively under Tsukioka Yoshitoshi and Ogata Gekkō, and Nōgaku Zue is where his lifelong project of documenting the classical stage took its mature shape before expanding into the multi-volume Nōga Taikan. The Art Institute of Chicago preserves this Matsuyama Tengu among its late nineteenth-century holdings.