Eight Views of Elegant Gallants (Furyu otokodate hakkei)
Furyu otokodate hakkei
About This Series
Eight Views of Elegant Gallants (Furyu otokodate hakkei) is one of Katsushika Hokusai's smaller early cycles, generally assigned to the late 1790s or early 1800s when he was working through the Sori name and into his early Hokusai signatures, in which the canonical eight-view format was applied to the otokodate figure, the Edo street-knight or commoner gallant whose codified swagger had been a staple of kabuki and popular fiction since the seventeenth century. The otokodate, literally the standing man, was a type drawn from the world of the merchant town, a sworn defender of the weak against samurai abuse who carried himself with theatrical bravado and dressed in the elaborate finery that the licensed quarters and the kabuki stage had codified into instantly legible costume. Hokusai's cycle pairs each of the eight inherited topographical and seasonal categories with a different otokodate figure, generating prints that function simultaneously as figure portraits and as landscape, and that play wittily on the contrast between the contemplative classical subject and the boisterous urban character supplied as its protagonist. The furyu, or elegant-fashionable, designation in the title signals the cycle's participation in the late-eighteenth-century vogue for pictorial wit and stylish revision of inherited subjects, a vogue that the kyoka poets and surimono designers of the period were exploring across parallel formats. As an early-career production, the series belongs to the same experimental impulse that produced Hokusai's Dutch-style Edo views and his joruri eight-view cycle, in which the formal conventions of the inherited eight-view were tested against unexpected figural and narrative materials. Surviving impressions are scarce and have been reconstructed by modern scholarship from a limited corpus, and the cycle is valued by collectors of his pre-1810 production as documentation of the breadth of experimental subjects he undertook before the great landscape projects of his Iitsu maturity.
Prints in This Series (1)
Frequently Asked Questions
Eight Views of Elegant Gallants (Furyu otokodate hakkei) is one of Katsushika Hokusai's smaller early cycles, generally assigned to the late 1790s or early 1800s when he was working through the Sori name and into his early Hokusai signatures, in which the canonical eight-view format was applied to the otokodate figure, the Edo street-knight or commoner gallant whose codified swagger had been a staple of kabuki and popular fiction since the seventeenth century. The otokodate, literally the standing man, was a type drawn from the world of the merchant town, a sworn defender of the weak against samurai abuse who carried himself with theatrical bravado and dressed in the elaborate finery that the licensed quarters and the kabuki stage had codified into instantly legible costume. Hokusai's cycle pairs each of the eight inherited topographical and seasonal categories with a different otokodate figure, generating prints that function simultaneously as figure portraits and as landscape, and that play wittily on the contrast between the contemplative classical subject and the boisterous urban character supplied as its protagonist. The furyu, or elegant-fashionable, designation in the title signals the cycle's participation in the late-eighteenth-century vogue for pictorial wit and stylish revision of inherited subjects, a vogue that the kyoka poets and surimono designers of the period were exploring across parallel formats. As an early-career production, the series belongs to the same experimental impulse that produced Hokusai's Dutch-style Edo views and his joruri eight-view cycle, in which the formal conventions of the inherited eight-view were tested against unexpected figural and narrative materials. Surviving impressions are scarce and have been reconstructed by modern scholarship from a limited corpus, and the cycle is valued by collectors of his pre-1810 production as documentation of the breadth of experimental subjects he undertook before the great landscape projects of his Iitsu maturity.
The Eight Views of Elegant Gallants (Furyu otokodate hakkei) series contains 1 prints, created by Katsushika Hokusai.
The Eight Views of Elegant Gallants (Furyu otokodate hakkei) series was created by Katsushika Hokusai (葛飾北斎).
We currently have 1 of 1 known prints from the Eight Views of Elegant Gallants (Furyu otokodate hakkei) series indexed in our collection. Browse them all on this page.
Want to rate prints from Eight Views of Elegant Gallants (Furyu otokodate hakkei)?
Sign up to start rating