Katsukawa Shunkō (勝川春好) (artist 1743 – 1812)

Alternate names: Denjirō (nickname - 伝次郎)
Kiyokawa (original family name - 清川)
Sahitsuan (go - 左筆庵)
Suhitsusai (go - 左筆斎)

Links

Biography:

Shunko was said to have become paralyzed in his right hand in 1790. His teacher Shunshō died two years later. Shun'ei, although talented, became the head of the Katsukawa school by default.

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Laurence Binyon in his Japanese Colour Prints wrote on page 71:

Katsukawa Shunkō, Shunshō’s first pupil, was born in 1743. His family name was Kiyokawa ; his personal name is unrecorded. He worked from 1771 till the autumn of 1791, when palsy deprived him of the use of his right arm, and compelled him to give up. Shaving his head, he became a lay bonze in the Zenshōji monastery at Asakusa. He used a jar-shaped seal enclosing the character Hayashi after the example of his master; sometimes, instead of Hayashi we find the ideograph Ki which is really one half of the former character. He died on December 1st, 1812, aged seventy years. There is a painting on a fusuma (paper sliding-screen) by him in the above monastery, inscribed “Drawn by Shunkō with his left hand at the age of fifty-seven."

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Someone at Wikipedia wrote: "He was a student of Katsukawa Shunshō, and is generally credited with designing the first large head actor portraits (ōkubi-e)."

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Shunkō's prints appear in numerous major collections including the Art Institute of Chicago; the Bibliothèque nationale de France; the British Museum; the Harvard Art Museums; the Rijksmuseum; the Chester Beatty Library; the Cleveland Museum of Art; the Honolulu Museum of Art; the Brooklyn Museum of Art; the Minneapolis Institute of Arts; the Library of Congress; the National Gallery of Victoria; the Ferenc Hopp Museum of Asiatic Arts; Ritsumeikan University; the Nationaal Museum van Wereldculturen; the musées Royaux d'Art et d'Histoire; the Seattle Asian Art Museum; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; Waseda University; the Museum of Oriental Arts, Venice; the Tokyo National Museum; the Israel Museum; the Tokyo Metropolitan Library; the National Museum of Asian Art; et al.