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

Suehiro is a Meiji woodblock print of 1893 by Tsukioka Kogyo from his series Pictures of No Performances (Nogaku Zue). The Suehiro is a kyogen-style or auspicious play depending on tradition, taking its name from the suehiro folding fan, an emblem of expanding fortune; the comic narrative follows a country servant sent to the capital to buy his lord a suehiro, who is deceived by a sharp townsman into bringing back an umbrella instead. Kogyo, the leading specialist in noh-e during the Meiji era, treats the figure with the same documentary care he applies to the formal noh repertoire, depicting the costume, headgear, and the disputed object with the precision of a careful observer of stage practice. The Art Institute of Chicago, where this impression is preserved, holds Nogaku Zue as one of the principal Meiji woodblock projects in its Japanese print collection and identifies Suehiro as a notable sheet in the kyogen-related portion of the series. As with Kogyo's other prints of this kind, the appeal of the sheet is in the disciplined registration, the careful patterning of textile and prop, and the spare ground of the noh stage that gives the figure room to be read. For collectors of noh-e, Suehiro is a useful demonstration of how Kogyo accommodates the comic register of kyogen within a project whose main work is the documentation of the serious noh repertoire.