Page:A history of Japanese colour-prints by Woldemar von Seidlitz.djvu/251

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THE POLYCHROME PRINT
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  • Kioka gojunin isshu (fifty humorous poems), 1786 (Yedo).
  • A small work in black and white, of the year 1802, humorous tales of wise men and fools in the baths.

Other illustrated books are mentioned by Duret.

Yenkoan seems to have been a pupil of Shigemasa (illustration in Hayashi Catalogue, No. 1006), and Nagabide a contemporary, who produced about 1770 a number of very graceful prints of single female figures. Kurth (Utamaro, p. 87) makes him a pupil of Nagayoshi, and accordingly puts his active period later, saying that he worked in Kioto and Osaka and that his pictures of actors were influenced by Sharaku. The Yekon Chuko teijo kagami (the Mirror of the Faith of Virtuous Women) (Jaekel Collection) is by him. Further research is needed on Nagabide.

Later on we shall mention two other pupils of Shigemasa, Shumman and Masayoshi.

(Katsu­) (kawa ) (Shun­) (sho)3. Shunsho.—Katsukawa Shunsho, who dominated wood-engraving during the seventies and trained a numerous school of pupils, was born in 1726 and died in 1792.[1] His artistic name was Jusuki. It was not he who founded this new artistic clan, but his teacher, Shunsui, the son or pupil of Choshun, who about the middle of this century had assumed the name of Katsukawa, but had been active only a short time as wood-engraver.[2] On the other hand, it is Shunsho's merit that he took up again the representations of actors, which had already gone somewhat out of fashion, and now continued the activity of the Torii with the additional aid of polychrome printing.[3] His activity began in 1764, when he followed Harunobu principally. From about 1770 his figures, like those in all the art of the time, became longer. Towards the end of the seventies the colouring

  1. Fenollosa Cat., Nos. 178-201; Anderson Cat., p. 343; Bing Cat., No. 235 ff.; Cat. Burty, No. 189 ff., 196; Strange, p. 33 f. The biographical dates are taken from the Hayashi Cat.
  2. Fenollosa Cat., No. 117. See also supra under Choshun.
  3. Fenollosa, Outline, p. 35.