The designer of these prints was born in 1726 and died about 1792--some authorities say 1790. His period of greatest activity covered the years 1765 to 1780, thus including the working periods of both Harunobu and Koriusai, and ending as Koriusai's did when in the eighties Kiyonaga's star rose blindingly. He lived for a while at the house of his publisher, Hayashi; sometimes in his early work he used in place of a signature a seal shaped like a small covered jar with handles, on which Hayashi's name is inscribed. The legend is that he was too poor to own a seal in the early days of his struggle and so borrowed that of his landlord! Shunsho had no antecedent teachers among the print-designers. He sprang instead from a school of painters who did not design for prints. These, headed by Choshun and his son Katsukawa Shunsui, had since 1700 been producing rich paintings of women in elaborate drapery. The Buckingham Collection contains one print by Shunsui, but it is an almost unique rarity. Shunsho, by a curious shift in the stream of art history, not only took up prints, but even took up the department of prints least in line with the tendencies of his own school, the department of actor-representation, which was the speciality of Kiyomitsu and the old Torii School, and which Harunobu's popular innovations had almost driven out of fashion. To this work Shunsho brought the new technique of Harunobu and great native individuality; and with the fresh armament of full colour he defended magnificently the threatened stronghold of actor-prints. His popularity became enormous. He grew quickly to the stature of one of the great and far-reaching powers in Ukioye history. Side by side with Harunobu, he in his separate field executed year by year actor-portraits which by their vigour of line and brilliancy of colour-combination take a place as high as that held by the works of his rival. No contrast could be more striking than that between them. The one is all grace, the other all force; the one loves to linger in quiet gardens, the other drags us up to the icy heights of tragic crisis. Shunsho's sense of dramatic composition was keen; and, as we see in Plate 19, his ferocious actor-faces peer out with a vivid menace, his tense actor-limbs shake with a concentrated and imprisoned fury not the less impressive because of its intentional exaggeration. They have not Harunobu's unreality of perfect grace, but the utterly different super-reality of magnified passion. In repose they are like statues; in action they have the vigour of those natural forces--waves, river currents, storms of thunder--which, as in the Shunsho print reproduced on the cover of this volume,[Transcriber's Note: The edition used to produce this etext did not include this print on the cover.] so often form their backgrounds. [Illustration: SHUNSHO: THE ACTOR NAKAMURA MATSUYE AS A WOMAN IN WHITE. Size 11 × 5½. Unsigned. _Plate 20._]