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

Sekidera Komachi, designed by Tsukioka Kōgyo in 1893 for Pictures of No Performances (Nōgaku Zue), depicts one of the three sanrō-mono or great old-woman plays of the Noh repertoire, reserved for the most experienced actors. The drama imagines the legendary Heian poet Ono no Komachi in extreme old age, living at the Sekidera temple, where a child poet recognizes her and draws from her a final dance of recollection. Kōgyo translates the dignity of this aged figure into a print of extraordinary restraint, the costume falling in long folds, the mask catching the spent beauty for which the role is famous. By choosing to include such a demanding and rarely staged play in his series, Kōgyo signaled the seriousness of his project: Nōgaku Zue was not a sampler of popular hits but a comprehensive survey, and Sekidera Komachi was one of its most ambitious subjects. As a leading Meiji ukiyo-e designer who built his career around Noh prints, he understood the play's standing within the form and matched it with a composition that holds the figure in still authority. His training under Tsukioka Yoshitoshi and Ogata Gekkō gave him the technical resources to handle such a difficult subject, and the resulting print would feed material into his later Nōga Taikan. The Art Institute of Chicago preserves this Sekidera Komachi, where the woodblock medium honors a play that few audiences would have seen but that every serious student of Noh recognized as the form's most exacting test.