Katsukawa Shunchō (勝川春潮) (artist 1783 – 1821)
Chūrinsha (go - 中林舎)Jugasei (go - 縦畵生)
Kichisadō (go - 吉左堂)
Kichizaemon (nickname - 吉左衛門)
Sankō (go - 三江)
Shien (go - 紫園)
Tansei (go - 丹青)
Tanseidō (go - 丹青堂)
Tōshien (go - 東紫園)
Yūbundō (go - 雄文堂)
Yūshidō (go - 雄芝堂)
Links
Biography:
Shunchō flourished between ca. 1780 and 1795.
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"As a pupil of Katsukawa Shunshō, Shunchō at first specialized in actor prints. Early in his career, however, he began to produce images of women, emulating Torii Kiyonaga's style. In fact, his oeuvre is largely defined by pictures of tall beautiful women, all showing Kiyonaga's influence. Nevertheless, Shunchō managed to imbue these images with his own artistic sensibility. In contrast to Kiyonaga's bright and clear coloring, for example, Shunchō tended to use subtle tonalities from a more restricted palette."
Quoted from: Worldly Pleasures, Earthly Delights: Japanese Prints from the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, 2011, p. 117, entry by Yuiko Kimura-Tilford.
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"Toyokuni's depiction of highly stylized facial features in a conventional three—quarters view of the head follows pictorial precedents established in nigao, or 'true likenesses'... Nigao offered a system of standardized, highly stylized caricature—like 'distillations' of likenesses of individual actors. Introduced by Katsukawa Shuncho from the 1760s the convention was widely employed well into the nineteenth century."
Quoted from: Chushingura and the Floating World: The Representation of Kanadehon Chushingura in Ukiyo-e Prints by David Bell, 2013, p. 32.
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"Studied under Shunshō, but curiously for a Katsukawa pupil designed no actor prints. His prints of beauties from the 1780s - often in triptych form - are very much in the Kiyonaga mold, as in his erotica, a genre in which he was prolific. In later years he studied under Shumman, using the name Kichisadō Shunchō.
Presently about twenty paintings are known. The earliest... are virtually indistinguishable from works by Shunshō, and the technique equally flawless. In the 1790s, however, the figures become more slender and the compositions more original."
Quoted from: Ukiyo-e Paintings in the British Museum by Timothy Clark, p. 112.
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Shunchō prints are included in many major institutional collections including those of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Ritsumeikan University, the Achenbach Foundation, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the British Museum, Harvard, the Honolulu Museum of Art, the Tokyo National Museum, the Library of Congress, the Museum für angewandte Kunst in Vienna, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Minneapolis Institute of Art, et al.