Posted by Noel Chiappa (98.166.150.196) on February 19, 2011 at 04:04:22:
In Reply to: What month is this? posted by Noel Chiappa on February 19, 2011 at 03:48:45:
Here is some additional data.
As I mentioned, I have been working on Kunisada II's series '8 Dog Heroes' (which is where this problem came from). I have found 49 prints from the series (of which I have 46 in high resolution images).
Of that 46, I have the following counts for the various months:
1852/9: 14 1852/12: 22 1852/??: 10
What's interesting is that all the 1852/9 prints have the same set of nanushi censor seals (Hama and Magomi), as do the 1852/12 (Murata and Kinugasa). (This seem to fit with something I seem to recall reading, that the nanushi censors operated in pairs for each month.) All the prints from the unknown month have as censors Muramatsu and Fuku, so I think they are all from just one month.
I had been hoping that in such a large series, we would have prints from all the months in a range, except one, and that missing month would tend to point to a single month as the correct value for this date. However, we don't have either '10' or '11', so it could be either - and since there is a gap in production, no matter what, it could be '7' too, with a one-month gap to '9'.
There is an title page for the series, which has a date of 1852/11, and censors Mera and Watanabe. If each month has unique censors combination, this would seem to rule out '11' as a possible month? However, both '7' and '10' seem to be possible.
Noel