Utsubo-saru, from the series "Pictures of No Performances (Nogaku Zue)"

Utsubo-saru, designed by Tsukioka Kōgyo in 1893 as part of Pictures of No Performances (Nōgaku Zue), illustrates one of the most affecting kyōgen plays in the repertoire, in which a daimyo encounters a monkey trainer with his pet on the road and demands the animal's skin to cover his quiver. The monkey's docility and the trainer's grief move the lord to spare the creature, and the play ends in song and dance. Kōgyo captures a single staged moment from this story and gives it the dignified treatment he brought to all his Noh and kyōgen subjects, rendering the monkey, the trainer, and the lord with attention to costume, prop, and the codified staging of the form. As a central figure in late nineteenth-century Meiji ukiyo-e who specialized almost entirely in Noh prints, Kōgyo treated the comic kyōgen with the same documentary seriousness he applied to the tragic Noh, an editorial choice that gave Nōgaku Zue a comprehensive scope. The series prefigures his later magnum opus Nōga Taikan, which would survey the entire repertoire of both forms across multiple volumes. He had trained successively under Tsukioka Yoshitoshi, whose name he adopted, and Ogata Gekkō, and the present sheet reflects both teachers' lessons in its assured line and quietly modulated color. The Art Institute of Chicago holds this Utsubo-saru among the late Meiji prints in which Kōgyo's lifelong project of recording the classical Japanese stage in polychrome woodblock found its early articulation.