Title : Act Eight

Artist : Tsuruya Kinsuke Tsurukin > Sökakudö

Date : 1806

Details : More information...

Source : Honolulu Museum of Art
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Description : A Treasury of Loyalty (Chüshingura) is a semi-fictional tale based on the true story of forty-seven samurai who tried to assassinate the feudal lord responsible for their master’s suicide. The story was very popular in the nineteenth century, and was the inspiration for numerous Kabuki plays and other popular fiction. It was a particularly important subject for Hokusai, since he traced his ancestry to one of the forty-seven samurai. Behind a group of travelers dominating the foreground, the mid-ground is occupied by numerous buildings along an active road, while a snow-covered Mount Fuji on the horizon marks the background. This print is a fine example of the way in which Hokusai combined Western perspective with the “bird’s-eye view” of traditional Japanese yamato-e painting. This convention allowed the artist to feature detailed figures and landscape elements in the foreground, while still providing a sense of depth to the two-dimensional plane. Such novel compositional techniques, characteristic of Hokusai’s experiments in the early 1800s, would have made his prints marketable to a sophisticated, often jaded Edo audience. “Hokusai’s Summit: Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji” (09/24/2009-01/06/2010) ******************************

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