Kitagawa Toyohide (北川豊秀) (artist )

Kataoka Gadō II (片岡我童) as Chishima Kanja Yoshihiro (千島冠者義広) in the play Keisei Satsumagushi [けいせい挟妻櫛] ('A Pledge of Affection and a Wife's Comb')

Print

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Date:09/1841
Dimensions:10 in x 14.75 in (Overall dimensions) Medium:color woodblock print
Inscription:Signed: Kitagawa Toyohide ga (北川豊秀画)
Publisher: Honya Seishichi (Marks 123 - seal 25-527)
Links Hankyu Culture Foundation
Waseda University Library - 1830 ehon of the 'Keisei Satsumagushi' Description:This play was performed at the Kado Theater in Osaka in 9/1841. Unfortunately, little is known of this play. (See the link above to the 1830 ehon at the Waseda Library. It was illustrated and possibly written by Ryūsai Shigeharu (1802-52).

Osaka Prints wrote: "The plot of the play Keisei satsumagushi (A pledge of affection and a wife's comb: 契情狭妻櫛 is unknown to us. The Japanese title is sometimes also given as けいせい狭妻櫛, which might suggest the pledge involves a courtesan (けいせい, keisei)."

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"The animated composition relies in part on the strong diagonal established by the cresting waves, à la Hokusai, in opposition to the slanting metallic rain."

"Barely a dozen designs are known by Toyohide, and impressions are very difficult to find, even more so in good condition, as here."

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Provenance:

"Formerly in the Okada Isajurō (岡田伊三次郎) Collection (featured in Kuroda Genji's 1929 "Kamigata-e Ichiran" Review of Kamigata Pictures)." Quoted from Osaka Prints.

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Illustrated in:

1) Ikeda bunko, Kamigata yakusha-e shūsei, vol. 3, 2001, #216.

2) "Hokusai's Great Waves in Nineteenth-Century Japanese Visual Culture" by Christine M. E. Guth, The Art Bulletin, Vol. 93, no. 4, December, 2011, p. 474.

Guth wrote, in regard to this print:

Hokusai's visual rhetoric underlines the fact that in Under the Wave off Kanagawa the wave's authority depends not simply on its scale but also on its singularity. In his design, Hokusai has tailored the visual tools that woodblock print artists customarily deployed to celebrate glamorous courtesans and Kabuki actors to devise a superstar wave. While modern viewers may liken the wave to the freeze-frame image captured by by the camera, in the context of the nineteenth century, it would be more appropriate to see it as nature imitating art. The great wave performs much as does an actor when he strikes a dramatic pose, or mie, at the high point of a Kabuki play. Recognition of this commonality is evident in a clever print issued in Osaka, where the frozen form of Hokusai's great wave serves as a dramatic double for the stop-action pose, mie, of a Kabuki actor onstage.

Related entities actor prints (yakusha-e - 役者絵) (genre)
Kyōto-Osaka prints (kamigata-e - 上方絵) (genre)
Honya Seishichi (本屋清七) (publisher)
Kataoka Gadō II (二代目片岡我童: from 1837 to 12/1856) (actor)

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