Description

The fifteenth print appearing in Volume 4 of Gishi taikan, edited by Fukumoto Nichinan. 

Fukmoto relates in his commentary that the print depicts the "morning after the attack on Kira’s mansion and the good news has spread like wildfire across the city of Edo. The kawaraban (single page newspaper) were quick to print the news and sell it loudly at every street corner, with men and women, young and old, coming out to read the report. They were shocked and filled with admiration and the city was in an uproar." 

Source: my translation of the beginning of Fukumoto's commentary (see detail below.)

Print Details

Artist Profile

In 1927, he founded his own academy of painting, the Shinsui Gakujuku (Shinsui Academy) which moved in 1930 being renamed Roho Gakujuku (Academy of the Clear Peak). Attracting many pupils Shinsui spawned a next generation of nihonga artists specializing in bijinga. An activist in art circles and government art institutions, Shinsui founded several societies, including the Seisei-kai in 1932 devoted to realism in portraiture, and the Seikin-kai in 1940, with Yamakawa Shuho (1898-1944), which had similar aims. His many portraits of women in up-to-date Westernized fashions and hair-styles in the 1950s and 60s bear witness to his determination to keep 'Nihonga' modernized. 

After the war Shinsui designed only a handful of prints, one of them ('Tresses', 1953) being published by the Japanese government which designated his skills as a print artist an 'Intangible Cultural Asset'. In 1958 he became a member of the Japanese Academy of Arts. His paintings include folding screens and albums as well as hanging scrolls, and he was equally at home on paper or silk, and in female subjects drawn from high or bourgeois life, the traditional dance forms, geishas, or the theatre. 

Source: website of The British Museum https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/term/BIOG2245