Description
Two robed figures occupy a room in Katsukawa Shunshō’s Analogy, one standing beside a railing and another seated or kneeling to the right. A band of calligraphy extends above their encounter. The subject connects shell collecting with the gathering of poetry, using the box of shells as a visual counterpart to an anthology and giving an ordinary activity a literary dimension.
This late-eighteenth-century color woodblock print joins ink, color and literary allusion on paper. Its imagery also recalls a poem in which love is compared with the inexhaustible shells along a shore. The work offers more than a scene of an activity: it asks the viewer to recognize a relationship between collecting, expression and abundance, allowing familiar objects to carry a wider imaginative meaning.
Read our guide to giclée prints or browse the Katsukawa Shunshō collection.
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