Shunga in two historical layers: antique master drawing and wartime Tsushima silk painting

This pair brings together an antique graphic work and a silk painting connected by the same composition and artistic line. The graphic version belongs to the professional tradition of antique shunga. Its confident line, controlled figure placement, and direct connection with classical shunga point to the hand of a trained master of the genre. The absence of an established artist’s name is not unusual in this field: anonymity, private circulation, and work outside the official art world were part of the historical nature of shunga.

The series of graphic works appears to have found a second life in painted versions on silk. Reverse inscriptions on related sheets connect this later layer with Tsushima, military service, and the wartime Showa years, approximately 1942-1944. These inscriptions include the name Sugimoto, probably an army corporal associated with the execution, circulation, or preservation of the series. In this way, an antique professional shunga composition was transferred into the private environment of wartime Tsushima, where the old genre continued in a different form and under different historical conditions.

The importance of this pair lies in the meeting of two layers: antique professional erotic graphic art and a private painted silk version connected with the military world of Tsushima. The series shows how shunga continued to exist outside official culture - as a closed, personal, and rare form of Japanese visual tradition in the twentieth century.