Original woodblock print – Paper – Okumura Masanobu (1686-1764) – Shōki 鍾馗 (Zhong Kui) The Demon Queller – Japan – Mid 18th century

While Masanobu’s early life is largely undocumented, he is believed to have been born about 1686, possibly in Edo (modern Tokyo). Edo was a small fishing village when it was Tokugawa Ieyasu chose it as his administrative capital of the Tokugawa shogunate, and by the early 17th century the city had prospered and its population had grown to half a million.

Masanobu appears to have been self-taught painter (though he did study poetry under Tachiba Fukaku); he is not known to have belonged to any artistic school.His early work shows the influence of the Torii school of ukiyo-e painting, particularly Torii Kiyonobu I, and he likely learned from the examples of Torii Kiyomasa and the early ukiyo-e artist Hishikawa Moronobu. A print album published by Kurihara Chōemon in 1701 depicting courtesans in the Yoshiwara pleasure district is Masanobu’s earliest surviving signed work, followed by a similar work ten months later. Moronobu provided the illustrations, and sometimes text, for at least twenty-two ukiyo-zōshi novels and librettos for puppet theatre between 1703 and 1711. These included a modernized illustrated version of the 11th-century Tale of Genji in eighteen volumes, whose translation was by Masanobu.