Sumo Wrestlers Inariyama and Matsuozaki

The artist Shun’ei is best known for his Kabuki actor portraits, but he also created several images of famous sumo wrestlers of his day, usually as single-figure sheets, but also a handful depicting a pair, as here, and as also in another print in The Met’s collection (JP1221). In both cases, rather than representing two athletes engaged in energetic grappling, Shun’ei captures a moment when their upper bodies press against each other, with their legs stepping outward, as they strive to achieve balance before exerting brute force against each other. The two muscular men, Inariyama on the right and Matsuozaki on the left, both with relatively calm facial expressions, lock their powerful bodies in a moment of taut suspense, their heavy muscles tightening as they brace for the exertion to come.

A disciple of Katsukawa Shunshō (1726–1793), Shun’ei emerged as a prolific and commercially successful woodblock print artist. Most active from the mid-1780s through the 1790s, he is credited as one of the first artists to popularize the emerging okubi-e, or “big head,” style of actor portraits.

The subcategory of sumo prints by Katsukawa artists emerged in the 1780s when Shunshō created print designs in response to the remarkable popular appeal of the wrestler Tanikaze Kajinosuke (1750–1795), who between 1778 and 1782 managed to achieve an unprecedented string of sixty-three consecutive wins. Only in 1782 did he finally face defeat by a relative newcomer, Onogawa Kisaburō (1758–1806). Shunshō and his student Shunkō (1743–1812) were pioneers of sumo print design. In the following generation, after Shunshō’s retirement, Shun’ei carried on the tradition of sumo prints, as did Katsukawa Shun’rō (1760–1849), who soon cut his ties with the Katsukawa school to establish himself as an independent artist and adopted the now-renowned art name Katsushika Hokusai (for examples of his rare sumo prints, see JP741 and JP742).