Tama-no-i, from the series "Pictures of No Performances (Nogaku Zue)"

Tama-no-i is an 1893 Meiji woodblock print by Tsukioka Kogyo from his landmark series Pictures of No Performances (Nogaku Zue), preserved in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago. The print captures a scene from the noh play of the same name, in which the symbolic well of jewels becomes a focal point for a quiet, ritualized drama. Kogyo composes the sheet with the spare, elevated dignity that characterizes noh-e: the actor is centered against an austere ground, costume patterns are described with restrained but precise line work, and props are kept to their iconographic essentials. As a pupil of Tsukioka Yoshitoshi and Ogata Gekko, Kogyo brought sophisticated figure drawing into a genre that demanded extreme economy of means, and Tama-no-i shows how he reconciled those instincts. The Nogaku Zue series, begun in the early 1890s, was one of the first sustained projects to treat noh subjects systematically as woodblock prints, and it remains the touchstone for collectors of noh-e to this day. Each sheet functions both as an artwork and as a small archive of a specific play, recording details of mask, fan, robe, and stance that would otherwise be transmitted only through performance. The Art Institute of Chicago's record at https://www.artic.edu/artworks/155287 places this impression within an established museum holding of Kogyo's noh prints. For collectors interested in the intersection of Meiji woodblock craft and classical Japanese theater, Tama-no-i offers a clear, scholarly example of Tsukioka Kogyo's ability to honor the stillness of noh while harnessing the full color and registration capabilities of the late-nineteenth-century print workshop.