Festivals of the Twelve Months

Acknowledged as the most important ukiyo-e painter of the early eighteenth century, Choshun celebrates the life of pleasure seeking.  His paintings emphasize the elegant coiffure and tailoring of the courtesans and their patrons who inhabit ukiyo, "the floating world," as the pleasure quarters were known.  In lieu of a concrete narrative, idealized seasonal settings provide the chronological framework for this painting, which is unrolled to show the autumn cycle.

Unlike many artists who portrayed life in the demimonde, the skilled colorist Choshun was known exclusively as a painter, not a print designer. His figural style is a distinctive blend of Hishikawa Moronobu's (circa 1618-1694) pleasantly rounded burghers and the fulsome, curvilinear beauties of Kaigetsudo Ando (active circa 1700-14). He stands at the head of an important lineage of painters that spawned Katsukawa Shunsho (1726?-1792), who dominated the production of actor prints and paintings in the late eighteenth century, and his disciple, Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849), the eclectic nineteenth-century master.