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Kubo Shunman (1757-1820)
Kubo Shunman, if the works he left behind are any indication, was a painter first, and a printmaker second. After his death in 1820, he left us 70 paintings, making him the most prolific artist of the Kitao school. His prints, on the other hand, were few and far between, but they had an elegance befitting a man who had been a student of the great Torii Kiyonaga.
Shunman studied with the painters Kitao Shigemasa and Kaatori Uohiko. But he also studied with the poet Katori Nahiko, for this young talent was also a poet of note.
His prints often featured beautiful women, always slender, well-coiffed and sumptuously dressed. The scholar Andres Marks notes that these women were often set in landscapes, such as in Shunman’s most famous woodblock print, a five-sheet work entitled “Six Jewel Rivers.” These works stand along as single sheets – such as this one – but can naturally be combined.
He embraced a quiet palette. In fact, he was part of the beni-girai or “red-hating” school, meaning that he eschewed this particular pigment, finding it garish. The phrase directly translates as “dislike of red.”
Later in life, he combined his poetry and his printmaking in designs that featured verse. Like many other Ukiyoe artists, he was also known to produce erotic prints, shunga, to make ends meet.
Unlike many Ukiyoe artists, he also was adept at still life. These were often featured in his small surimono private prints. In fact, Marks notes, Shunman’s earliest known work was a copy of a votive plaque by Nahiko in 1774. Interestingly, but likely little more than a coincidence, at this exact same time on the other side of the planet in France, Jean Siméon Chardin, perhaps history’s greatest still life painter, was at the height of his powers.
Small world. But then again, isn’t that what still life paintings are all about?