Like a falcon, flown To bleak mid-regions of sky, He poises. One image alone Holds his sinister eye--
A vision, a prey Towards which he shall soon be hurled-- And his fury shall darken the day, And his joy, the world.
A music enfolds him Like the thunders that are poured Across heaven; it holds him With the song of the sword.
It enthrals, it inspires, And its zenith shall be Lightning of unleashed desires Crashing along the sea.
[Illustration: SHUNSHO: AN ACTOR OF THE ISHIKAWA SCHOOL IN TRAGIC RÔLE.
Those actor-types which Harunobu and his school so scornfully cast aside became the chosen speciality of the greatest of his rivals and contemporaries, Katsukawa Shunsho. As one examines sheet after sheet of Shunsho's theatrical prints, Harunobu's contemptuous words concerning "this vulgar herd," the actors, lose their significance; for here pass in gorgeous procession a series of lofty, intense, and unforgettable figures charged with the quintessence of heroic force.
The designer of these prints was born in 1726 and died about 1792--some authorities say 1790. His period of greatest activity covered the years 1765 to 1780, thus including the working periods of both Harunobu and Koriusai, and ending as Koriusai's did when in the eighties Kiyonaga's star rose blindingly. He lived for a while at the house of his publisher, Hayashi; sometimes in his early work he used in place of a signature a seal shaped like a small covered jar with handles, on which Hayashi's name is inscribed. The legend is that he was too poor to own a seal in the early days of his struggle and so borrowed that of his landlord!
Shunsho had no antecedent teachers among the print-designers. He sprang instead from a school of painters who did not design for prints. These, headed by Choshun and his son Katsukawa Shunsui, had since 1700 been producing rich paintings of women in elaborate drapery. The Buckingham Collection contains one print by Shunsui, but it is an almost unique rarity. Shunsho, by a curious shift in the stream of art history, not only took up prints, but even took up the department of prints least in line with the tendencies of his own school, the department of actor-representation, which was the speciality of Kiyomitsu and the old Torii School, and which Harunobu's popular innovations had almost driven out of fashion. To this work Shunsho brought the new technique of Harunobu and great native individuality; and with the fresh armament of full colour he defended magnificently the threatened stronghold of actor-prints. His popularity became enormous. He grew quickly to the stature of one of the great and far-reaching powers in Ukioye history. Side by side with Harunobu, he in his separate field executed year by year actor-portraits which by their vigour of line and brilliancy of colour-combination take a place as high as that held by the works of his rival.