Sangi Masatsune

The ninth print in this set depicts the councillor Fujiwara no Masatsune. As usual I went to my books to see if I could find something interesting about him, but all I got was a puzzle. The first reference I read stated that his father was Shunzei, whose print you received last year. This would make him the brother of Fujiwara no Sadaie, the compiler of the Hyaku nin Isshu anthology. I thought that would be something worth mentioning, but when I checked another book, it listed his father as Fujiwara no Yoritsune, a 'disciple' of Shunzei. Hmmm. Perhaps there is a story here, but you'll have to hear it somewhere else, because there's no way I'm going to start getting tangled up in one of those Heian era family tree diagrams ..

Of course, I was relieved not to have to carve a nose or mouth this time, but I paid for it in the kimono patterns. Whoever prepared the tracing for the carver got a little carried away with the circle patterns. Whenever Shunsho finished sketching one of these pictures (the pose and the flow of the drapery), he would prepare a sample pattern on a separate sheet of paper. Somebody, perhaps Shunsho himself, perhaps an apprentice, would then take this sample, slide it underneath Shunsho's drawing (made on thin paper), and trace the pattern in various places on the kimono. The placing of the patterns in this print seems to me to be quite unartistic and overdone, so shall we assume that it was an apprentice?

I should also say something about the colours on this print. As I have mentioned before, the printers who worked on the original book used a very limited range of pigments, and many of the poets are shown wearing exactly the same colours. I suppose that when people looked at the book they probably flipped through the pages quite quickly, and each print would only be inspected for a minute or so. But as you are receiving these prints at the rate of one per month, I would like to add more variety. If I continued to repeat the same colours, I am sure it would not be so interesting.

The 'colours' on this print are my own idea. There are five of them, and they are of course all from the same sumi stick. I have been thinking about trying something like this for some time now, and this print seemed to be suitable. There is a long tradition of creating colour with sumi in both Chinese and Japanese art, but we don't often see prints made this way. Does it work? I think so, but I have to confess that my advisors around the house weren't so sure!

Coming up next to finish off the year, Prince Teishin.

November 1991