Emperor Sanjo

Here we are again, with the start of our seventh year of Hyaku-nin Isshu Hanga ... I would have liked to select a more cheerful poem to kick off the year, but had to stick with my habit of putting the emperor at the beginning ...

The Emperor Sanjo lived just exactly 1000 years before our time, at the turn of the last millenium. The history books tell us he didn't have a particularly happy life, having many problems with both health and politics, and his poem reflects this. I'm glad not many of the Hyaku-nin Isshu poems are this gloomy ... I'd rather read love poems! (But maybe that's what this is!)

Do you notice something a bit 'funny' about the pattern on the 'carpet' in this picture? The carpet itself is presumably square, but as we are looking at it from an angle, it is depicted as a lozenge, in accordance with the rules of perspective. But look at the circular patterns; going by the same rules, they should appear as elliptical shapes ... What's wrong?

What's 'wrong' is our modern feeling that such things should be consistent. 18th century Japanese artists obviously saw things somewhat differently. They had no conception of a picture as an object that should match what we actually see in the real world. If you look back over the prints in this series, you will see many examples of distorted perspective, incorrect scaling of body parts, limbs placed in impossible positions, etc., etc. To us today, they look 'funny'. But 'realism' was not something that concerned those men very much. They worked in a very 'flat' 2-dimensional world. They could delineate the fall of drapery very realistically with their fluid brush strokes, but 'extraneous' things like clothing patterns were applied in a quite careless 'slapdash' manner.

Prints from this era thus stand at the 'clash' of two traditions. Seen in their basic essentials - just the bare lines of the figure and the fabrics, they look generally natural and free of any distortion. But in the attempt to make them more realistic, by adding patterns to the carpet and clothing, Shunsho (or more likely, his assistants) merely succeeded in confusing us, and this sort of thing was to happen more and more in all the later ukiyo-e. The designers forgot that they were working with a 'flat' medium, and tried to make woodblocks do things for which they were not really suited ...

But I'd better not get too deeply into the 'art history' lessons here. Even with the 'funny' patterns, I hope you can enjoy this month's print.

February 1995

Translation - Haruo Miyata 1981