Page:The Surviving Works of Sharaku (1939).djvu/30

 assurance within these dates, and while our attributions of the three doubtful ones are tentative there are reasons for believing them to be correct.

Of the aiban size of actor prints only 10 are known, and all of these are single bust-portraits on yellow grounds. They seem to be associated with plays produced from the eleventh month of 1794 to the first month of 1795. The dating of the portrait of Miyako Dennai and of the four prints representing wrestlers is treated fully in the body of the catalogue.

With one or two exceptions the ōban bust-portraits are not as rare as most of Sharaku’s other prints. Several of the hosoye exist only in single impressions and in a number of cases only two are known to survive. We have given in the text of the catalogue all of the information that we have about the present location of the excessively rare subjects, and in connection with those that are less scarce we have indicated the number of impressions found in the collections in America. The comparison of different impressions is of extreme interest to students and in order to help in that regard we have given in each catalogue sheet references to previous reproductions of the subject under discussion, endeavoring to point out, wherever that was possible, the mere rephotographing for one book of a plate that had been used in another. In many instances this throws interesting light on the scarcity of prints by Sharaku and in many other cases it enables comparison of impressions to be made.

It seems best to discuss not here but in the body of the catalogue the considerable number of prints that have hand-written inscriptions with a date equivalent to the ninth month of 1794, and we describe in connection with its most conspicuous example another lot of prints bearing inscriptions that are believed to be in the calligraphy of one of the compilers of the original notebook from which we have quoted the earliest known references to Sharaku. The man who wrote those inscriptions seems to have formed a collection of prints by the artist we are studying and his seal has been found on the back of the one referred to just above. For discussion of these two sets of inscriptions see numbers 2 and 100.

The production of mica ground prints stops abruptly at the eighth month of 1794. This stoppage now is known to have coincided with a government edict against further issuance of prints of that type, and we have circumstantial evidence to show that between the promulgation of the law and its enforcement there must have been a considerable demand for at least some of those by Sharaku. In any case the period now under