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

Tsukioka Kogyo's Properties, 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 departs from the figure compositions that make up much of the Nogaku Zue series by documenting the stage properties used in noh performance. Where most sheets show a moment from a play, this one inventories the objects themselves, the masks, fans, headgear, and hand-properties that supply the symbolic language of the stage. Kogyo's noh-e undertaking aimed at completeness as well as image-making, and the inclusion of property studies reflects an ambition shared by the Meiji reconstruction of noh more broadly, to give the art a documented archive worthy of its restored status. As Tsukioka Yoshitoshi's pupil, Kogyo had absorbed the careful descriptive line that distinguished his teacher's late prints, and that discipline applies here to objects rather than to figures. The carving renders the surfaces of lacquer, silk, and wood with controlled differentiation, and the printing keeps the muted ground that distinguishes performance documentation from popular theatre prints. The Nogaku Zue series, produced across the 1890s with the cooperation of the great schools then re-establishing the art under Meiji patronage, supplied collectors and performers alike with one of the most thorough records of the noh world made during the period. The Art Institute of Chicago documents this impression in its online catalogue.