File:Painting, handscroll, shunga (BM 1980,0325,0.4 4).jpg

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painting, handscroll, shunga   (Wikidata search (Cirrus search) Wikidata query (SPARQL)  Create new Wikidata item based on this file)
Title
painting, handscroll, shunga
Description
English: Painting, handscroll. Shunga. Ten scenes of lovemaking. Ink, colour and mica on paper.
Date circa 1800
date QS:P571,+1800-00-00T00:00:00Z/9,P1480,Q5727902
Medium paper
Dimensions
Height: 27.90 centimetres
Width: 638.10 centimetres (Overall)
institution QS:P195,Q6373
Current location
Asia
Accession number
1980,0325,0.4
Notes

In two scenes a young woman lies dreaming after reading what we assume must be a letter from her lover. The dream ‘bubble’ leads into a scene of young lovers committing love-suicide (shinju-). Spreading a red blanket on a lonely moor and dressing their bodies in the white robes of death, the two prepare to meet their end. The young woman has already accepted their imminent fate and, eyes tightly shut, clasps her hands together in a Buddhist prayer to be reborn in Amida’s paradise (nenbutsu). They will draw their final breath locked together in one last intimate embrace, lamenting the cruel world that will not permit them to share their lives together.

Love-suicide plays were a sub-genre in kabuki and puppet theatre, and feature large in the work of Chikamatsu Monzaemon (1653–1725), Japan’s greatest playwright. Often the poetry leading up to their deaths suggests that the two bodies become one in sexual union. In the early eighteenth century these plays and the incidents on which they were based became wildly popular; so much so that the government banned love-suicide plays in 1722 and did not allow suicide lovers a proper burial in order to discourage the practice. Nevertheless, the popularity of this romantic genre of idealized and absolute love has continued into the modern era. A pupil of Katsukawa Shunsho- (d. 1792), Shun’ei was primarily a print artist who designed a large number of actor portraits. Not many paintings by him are known and even fewer shunga works in any medium. The only erotic book by Shun’ei currently recorded is Ominameshi (Maiden Flower, or Look at What these Men and Women are Doing) of 1789 (Clark et al 2013, cat. 131). Shun’ei’s paintings have an idiosyncratic personal style in terms of the manner of drawing the figures and their colour scheme. The eyelashes are painted especially luxuriously, giving a powerful sensuality, even a ghostly beauty, to the facial expressions. The sense of modelling in dark and light tones on the flesh colours of the bodies is also unique to Shun’ei and not found in paintings by other artists of the Katsukawa school. The scroll presently has ten scenes, but it is likely that it originally comprised the customary twelve and that two are now missing. [IA]
Source/Photographer https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/A_1980-0325-0-4
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(Reusing this file)		 © The Trustees of the British Museum, released as CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
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current20:05, 11 May 2020Thumbnail for version as of 20:05, 11 May 20201,600 × 904 (196 KB)Copyfraud (talk | contribs)British Museum public domain uploads (Copyfraud/BM) Eroticism in the British Museum 1800 image 5 of 10 #285/1,471

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