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

Shaso is a Meiji woodblock print of 1893 by Tsukioka Kogyo from his series Pictures of No Performances (Nogaku Zue). The sheet, whose title refers to a shrine attendant, belongs to the body of Kogyo's noh-e in which the artist documents the wider supporting cast of the noh repertoire alongside its principal warrior and ghost plays. The Art Institute of Chicago, source of this impression, holds Nogaku Zue as one of the central Meiji woodblock projects in its Japanese print collection and identifies Kogyo as the defining interpreter of noh in print. Throughout the series Kogyo applies the same disciplined approach: he studies the play in actual performance, fixes on the moment that best identifies the character, and composes the print around the masked figure with characteristic robe, headgear, and prop. Color separations are restrained; registration is exact; the open ground of the noh stage is preserved as a graphic given rather than a literal floor. Shaso exhibits these qualities at the quieter end of the noh-e spectrum, where attentiveness rather than incident is the source of pictorial interest. For collectors of Meiji theatre prints, sheets like this one demonstrate the consistency that allowed Kogyo to make a series of more than two hundred images cohere as a single body of work, an achievement that defines his place in the history of Japanese woodblock printmaking.