Eight views of Traveling Lovers from Joruri Plays
About This Series
Eight Views of Traveling Lovers from Joruri Plays is the modern English designation for a small Hokusai cycle, generally assigned to the early nineteenth century during his Sori or early Hokusai period, in which the canonical eight-view format was reworked around the figural and emotional repertoire of the joruri puppet theater. The joruri, the chanted-narrative theater whose great early-eighteenth-century playwright Chikamatsu Monzaemon had established the michiyuki, or travel scene, as one of its signature dramatic conventions, supplied Hokusai with a roster of doomed and runaway lovers whose journeys could be paired with the eight-view's seasonal and topographical schema. The format thus collapses two long-standing East Asian conventions into a single cycle, marrying the inherited Chinese eight-view structure to the native theatrical subject of the lovers' journey, and the resulting prints function simultaneously as bijinga, as landscape, and as theater commemorative. As an early-career experiment in genre hybridity, the cycle belongs to the same impulse that produced Hokusai's Dutch-style Edo views and his various perspective and etching-style sets, in which inherited print conventions were tested against new pictorial and narrative materials. Hokusai's handling of the lovers theme draws on his Katsukawa-school figure training under Shunsho, while the topographical settings register the early stages of the landscape vocabulary he would carry forward into the great fukei-e projects of his Iitsu period two decades later. The series belongs to a body of small-scale Hokusai cycles whose surviving impressions are scarce and whose attribution and publication history have been reconstructed by modern scholarship from a limited corpus of surviving sheets. Modern collections, including those at the Sumida Hokusai Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and the British Museum, hold representative impressions, and surviving prints are valued by collectors of his pre-1810 work as documentary witnesses to the experimental period in which he developed the genre synthesis that would mature in his late masterpieces.
Prints in This Series (1)
Frequently Asked Questions
Eight Views of Traveling Lovers from Joruri Plays is the modern English designation for a small Hokusai cycle, generally assigned to the early nineteenth century during his Sori or early Hokusai period, in which the canonical eight-view format was reworked around the figural and emotional repertoire of the joruri puppet theater. The joruri, the chanted-narrative theater whose great early-eighteenth-century playwright Chikamatsu Monzaemon had established the michiyuki, or travel scene, as one of its signature dramatic conventions, supplied Hokusai with a roster of doomed and runaway lovers whose journeys could be paired with the eight-view's seasonal and topographical schema. The format thus collapses two long-standing East Asian conventions into a single cycle, marrying the inherited Chinese eight-view structure to the native theatrical subject of the lovers' journey, and the resulting prints function simultaneously as bijinga, as landscape, and as theater commemorative. As an early-career experiment in genre hybridity, the cycle belongs to the same impulse that produced Hokusai's Dutch-style Edo views and his various perspective and etching-style sets, in which inherited print conventions were tested against new pictorial and narrative materials. Hokusai's handling of the lovers theme draws on his Katsukawa-school figure training under Shunsho, while the topographical settings register the early stages of the landscape vocabulary he would carry forward into the great fukei-e projects of his Iitsu period two decades later. The series belongs to a body of small-scale Hokusai cycles whose surviving impressions are scarce and whose attribution and publication history have been reconstructed by modern scholarship from a limited corpus of surviving sheets. Modern collections, including those at the Sumida Hokusai Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and the British Museum, hold representative impressions, and surviving prints are valued by collectors of his pre-1810 work as documentary witnesses to the experimental period in which he developed the genre synthesis that would mature in his late masterpieces.
The Eight views of Traveling Lovers from Joruri Plays series contains 1 prints, created by Katsushika Hokusai.
The Eight views of Traveling Lovers from Joruri Plays series was created by Katsushika Hokusai (葛飾北斎).
We currently have 1 of 1 known prints from the Eight views of Traveling Lovers from Joruri Plays series indexed in our collection. Browse them all on this page.
Want to rate prints from Eight views of Traveling Lovers from Joruri Plays?
Sign up to start rating