[Illustration: SHUNCHO: TWO LADIES IN A BOAT ON THE SUMIDA RIVER.
In his finest prints the softly luminous colour and the gently sweeping lines of his ladies move sometimes through the palely glowing rooms of palaces, but more often through sunlit fields and gardens and blossoming groves--regions of delight and cloudless skies, scenes of eternal happiness. His colour-schemes in these natural settings are artfully contrived to produce, through the limited agency of flat tints, an impression of crystal-clear atmosphere around and behind the figures. In both his triptychs and his pillar-prints there often stretches away this delicate world of hills or seashore or river-bank that plays no small part in the incantation of beauty. His pillar-prints, of which three are reproduced in Plates 32 and 33, are especially fine; I sometimes think that here he surpasses Kiyonaga.
And yet there is about all his work a strange impersonality, an absence of any note that brings to our notice Shuncho himself, the observer and recorder. He is detached even from his own most perfect work. Compare him with Harunobu or Sharaku or Utamaro, and observe how invisible he is--how his designs have a transparency that absolutely conceals him.
In historical importance and in originality Shuncho is secondary to Kiyonaga; in absolute beauty his work deserves a place beside that of the master. As a colourist--his most distinguished rôle--he was perhaps the greater of the two.
The collector may be interested to note that practically all Shuncho's work is printed with the utmost sharpness and refinement; poor impressions of his prints are almost unknown. In this particular he is in striking contrast to many of his contemporaries; and one may perhaps trace his care to the training of Shunsho, of whose work also I have seldom seen a really poor impression. Shuncho's work is unfortunately not common; finely preserved copies are scarcer than Kiyonaga's.
Katsukawa Shunzan was a little-known artist who worked from about 1775 to about 1810. He was first, as his name would suggest, a pupil of Shunsho; in his rare early prints in _hoso-ye_ form he produced actors in the manner of that school with considerable charm of line, but without great vigour. Even in these early pieces Shunzan's leaning towards sweetness and suavity suggests that he was not at home in the Shunsho manner; and it is not strange to find that he later turned to Kiyonaga, under whose powerful influence he produced his best-known work--beautiful ladies in robes of splendour. He generally copied the Kiyonaga type of figure closely, but a little stiffly; and he was not often master of those harmonies of arrangement and grouping which distinguished his teacher. But occasionally his colour is very rich and glowing.