Lot 232C
19th C. Chikanobu Triptych - Snowy Visit
19th C. Chikanobu Triptych - Snowy Visit
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Toyohara "Yoshu" Chikanobu (Japanese, 1838-1912). "Hino Suketoshi Visits Shinozuka and Her Daughter on a Snowy Night" woodblock print triptych, 1889. Titled at upper right of right sheet. Signed lower right of the right sheet with artist's seal.. A winter nocturne in three woodblock sheets, hushed and snowbound, turning on a secret visit paid under cover of darkness. The left sheet is almost empty of figures, a study in cold: a steep snowbank, bare branches and pines bowed under their white weight, a pale glaze of frozen water, and a low diamond-lattice fence half-buried in drifts, the whole rendered in soft bokashi gradations that let the eye feel the chill before it finds the story. The center sheet brings the drama forward. Shinozuka stands in the snow in an olive robe shot with purple and crimson, a flaming torch in her hand, glancing back over her shoulder with the apprehension of someone who fears she has been followed. Below her, the young samurai Hino Suketoshi rests at the edge of the veranda, still cloaked in a straw traveler's raincoat with a wooden chest strapped to his back, his swords at his hip, newly arrived from the road. On the right sheet, within the shelter of the rustic house, the daughter kneels to offer him a tray and a cup, a great spinning wheel beside her, the humble apparatus of a noble family reduced to domestic labor in hiding. Size of each: 9.7" W x 14.4" H (24.6 cm W x 36.6 cm H); all together: 29.2" W x 14.4" H (74.2 cm W x 36.6 cm H).
The subject belongs to the long literary afterlife of the Nanbokucho wars, the fourteenth-century struggle between the Northern and Southern Courts that the Taiheiki fixed in the Japanese imagination as an age of doomed loyalty. The Hino were the courtier house most closely bound to Emperor Go-Daigo's restoration, and the warrior-name Shinozuka carried associations with the partisans of Nitta Yoshisada, so the scene reads as a tableau of fidelity in adversity: a loyalist seeking out the concealed family of a comrade, the torch and the backward glance marking the danger of discovery, the snow standing as both literal hardship and an emblem of unstained constancy. The chest on Suketoshi's back, perhaps bearing documents or a family treasure carried out of reach of enemies, lends the encounter the weight of something entrusted and preserved.
Chikanobu was uniquely suited to such material. A former retainer of the Sakakibara clan who had taken up arms for the shogunate before taking up the brush, he brought to historical subjects the sympathies of a man who had known the samurai world from within, and to court and domestic scenes a connoisseur's attention to textile and gesture. The print rewards close looking with the refinements of his mature period: blind embossing worked into the white trim of the kimono, fine gradated shading across the snow and sky, and the controlled, almost theatrical restraint of a palette keyed to winter. It is a quiet performance from an artist better known for the spectacle of the Chiyoda court, and the more affecting for its silence.
Title cartouche upper right of the right sheet. Signed lower right of the right sheet "Yoshu Chikanobu" with the artist's red seal, the block carver's seal alongside. Publication and date cartouche (Meiji 22, 1889) at the left margin of the right sheet.
About the artist: Toyohara Chikanobu (1838-1912), born Hashimoto Naoyoshi in Echigo Province, arrived at printmaking by way of the battlefield. A retainer of the Sakakibara clan of Takada Domain, he fought as a Shogitai loyalist in the Battle of Ueno and later at the Goryokaku star fort in Hakodate during the final, doomed stand of the Tokugawa order, earning a reputation for personal bravery before the new Meiji government made samurai careers obsolete. The sword exchanged for the brush, he traveled to Tokyo in 1875, found work illustrating for the Kaishin Shimbun, and built a prolific parallel practice in nishiki-e woodblock printing.
His training traced an unusually layered lineage: early study in the Kano school of painting, followed by instruction under a disciple of Keisai Eisen, then the workshop of Utagawa Kuniyoshi (under whom he called himself Yoshitsuru), and finally Kunisada, before studying nigao-e portraiture with Toyohara Kunichika, whose name he adopted into his own art name, Yoshu Chikanobu.
He worked across a remarkable range of subjects: warrior prints and war reportage, kabuki actor portraits, scenic views, historical pageant, and the genre that made him a household name, bijinga, images of beautiful women. His series on women's fashion and court life inside the Imperial Palace at Chiyoda captured an audience hungry for glimpses of a world few could enter. His "Mirror of Ages" (1897) traced the evolution of women's hairstyles across eras with the precision of a social historian and the eye of a colorist. When he died in 1912, the Miyako Shimbun mourned that Edo-e, the great Tokyo woodblock tradition, had perished with him.
Provenance: private Las Vegas, Nevada, USA collection
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Item #
195208
- Condition: Excellent. Three separate panels. A few light stains and areas of discoloration, but, otherwise, print is in excellent overall condition.
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