This is a fine impression and well-preserved example of an early shunga, or erotic print, from the earliest period of Floating World print culture. It is a single sheet, printed in black line on paper, without color. The print is unsigned, not unusual for early shunga prints, and the attribution is based on style. The seal of the early-twentieth-century scholar-collector Kiyoshi Shibui on the reverse of the sheet provides unusually clear provenance information.
Kiyonobu I was founder of the important early school of Ukiyo-e artists, the Torii, which specialized in images of the Kabuki theater, in prints and in paintings. He also produced many images of the common genre of beautiful women as well as shunga, a genre most Floating World artists made, though mostly ignored until recently by scholars.1 Asano Shugo, specialist in Floating World material, has estimated that Kiyonobu I produced around one hundred erotic prints, most of which were parts of sets of eight to twelve prints;2 the print under consideration was likely part of such a set. Some prints received hand-colored elaboration, though this print is without additional color. (Given that such coloring is sometimes a later addition, the lack of color on this print should be considered a virtue.) A singular painted handscroll of erotic subject matter by Kiyonobu I was recently rediscovered in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, which comprises eleven scenes of lovemaking, each a handpainted counterpart to the proposed print.3
1 An important contribution to the new field of scholarship is Timon Screech, Sex and the Floating World: Erotic Images in Japan 1700-1820 (London: Reaktion Books, 1999).
2 Timothy Clark, et al, The Dawn of the Floating World, 1615–1765: Early Ukiyo-e Treasures from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (London: Royal Academy of Arts, 2001), p. 100–101.
3 Clark, The Dawn of the Floating World, 1615–1765: Early Ukiyo-e Treasures from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, p. 100–103.