Poems on Portraits of the Famous and the Infamous (Kyōka kijin gazō-shū) 狂歌奇人画像集

This black-ink woodblock book opening shows two facing pages, each bordered by a black rule and filled with columns of cursive kyōka poetry alongside rectangular cartouches naming the figures, including Ono no Michikaze, Minamoto no Yoshimitsu, Ono no Komachi, and Kaidōmaru. On the left page, two seated men in patterned robes—one bare-headed with a thin mustache holding a long pipe with a small frog-shaped pendant dangling from its cord, the other in a dark peaked cap—sit above a reclining, partly undressed woman beside a low table; on the right page, a bare-chested, shaggy-haired crouching figure grips a small furred animal near a seated woman with long loose hair holding a brush and paper, with draped patterned bedding filling the space between them. The work is Utagawa Kunisada's Poems on Portraits of the Famous and the Infamous (Kyōka kijin gazō-shū), dated 1700, a polychrome woodblock-printed book with gold lacquer on a red lacquer ground.