** Fuji Musume — The Wisteria Maiden, One of the Most Iconic Prints in the Series ** Ogata Gekkō (尾形月耕) Fuji Musume (藤娘) — The Wisteria Maiden From Bijin Hana Kurabe (美人花競) — Beauties Compared to Flowers Technique: Woodblock print (mokuhanga), polychrome (nishiki-e) Date: Meiji period, c. 1895–1896 Publisher: Matsuki Heikichi (松木平吉) Format: Ōban tate-e, approx. 36.7 × 24 cm (14.4 × 9.8 inches) ---------------------------------------------------------------- Condition Report Impression & Colours: Very good. A fresh impression preserving the technical effects that distinguish this series: the soft bokashi gradation of the peach-toned wall behind the figure, the silver-grey metallic pigment on the lacquered hat (worked to suggest the gloss of black lacquer over painted floral decoration), the careful registration of the deep wine-red furisode against the pale pink and white wisteria clusters cascading across it, and the subtle blue-green diaper pattern of the under-kimono. The shadow of the wisteria branch cast onto the wall at left — printed as a pale silhouette in the warm ground colour — is a particularly accomplished technical touch. Paper: Very good. Full sheet with minor trimming. Paper firm and supple, with light and even age toning consistent with a sheet of this date. ---------------------------------------------------------------- Fuji Musume — The Wisteria Maiden A young woman stands in the middle of a tatami room, half-turned away from the viewer, a flowering branch of wisteria slung over her right shoulder so that its long racemes of purple and pink blossoms tumble down her back. She wears the defining attribute of her identity: the great black lacquered hat (kurokasa) painted with chrysanthemum-like flowers in pink and pale green, tipped forward to shade her downcast face. Her furisode is a deep oxblood red scattered with cascading wisteria in white and pink, worn over a pale blue under-kimono patterned with tiny linked rings. The trailing hem spreads behind her across the green tatami in a long, graceful sweep — the unmistakable silhouette of a kabuki dancer mid-pose. Behind her, partly visible against an orange-toned wall, stands a second figure in purple haori — a young samurai or falconer with a hooded hawk perched on his gauntleted hand. He looks resolutely away from her. The visual conceit is the heart of the design: the maiden is alone in the picture even though she is not alone in the room, lost in private reverie about a young man who does not see her. To the left of the composition, the silhouette of her own wisteria-laden form is cast onto the screen behind her, transforming her shadow into something half-flower, half-human. ---------------------------------------------------------------- The subject — a legend in three layers The Fuji Musume (Wisteria Maiden) is one of the most instantly recognisable subjects in all of Japanese art, and its meaning operates on three levels at once. At its origin, the Wisteria Maiden was a folk-painting subject of the Ōtsu-e tradition — the cheap, vigorous souvenir paintings sold to travellers at the post-town of Ōtsu near Kyoto in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The image of a young woman in a black hat with a branch of wisteria became one of the standard Ōtsu-e types, often hung in homes as a charm against bad marriages. In 1826, the folk image was reimagined as a great kabuki dance, Fuji Musume, choreographed for the onnagata Seki Sanjūrō II. In the dance, the spirit of the wisteria descends from a painted panel and dances out her unrequited love for a young man who never returns her gaze — exactly the scenario Gekkō stages here. The dance became one of the most beloved pieces of the hengemono (transformation dance) repertoire and remains a centrepiece of the kabuki stage today; the silhouette of the maiden in her black hat with the wisteria over her shoulder is as recognisable to a Japanese audience as Hokusai's Great Wave. Gekkō's print operates on the third level: a mitate (parallel comparison) in which a contemporary Meiji beauty is shown as the Wisteria Maiden — perhaps an actress photographed in costume, perhaps a courtesan in the role, perhaps simply a poetic fiction. The young man with the falcon, glimpsed at the back of the room and turned away from her, is the figure of her unattainable love — silently embedded in the composition as both an aristocratic ornament and an iconographic clue. -------------------------------------------------------------------- The Series — A Meiji Masterpiece of Restraint and Technique Bijin Hana Kurabe ("Beauties Compared to Flowers") is one of the great unsung series of late Meiji printmaking. Comprising 24 ōban designs and issued over more than a decade between 1887 and 1899, each print pairs a beautiful woman with a specific flower or flowering plant: plum, cherry, iris, chrysanthemum, peony, wisteria, camellia, willow — and, here, the pine. The standard Japanese convention of mitate (parallel comparison) governs the conceit, but Gekkō pushes the form into territory that no earlier ukiyo-e bijin artist had explored. What sets the series apart from every contemporary bijin-ga project of the 1880s and 1890s is its extraordinary restraint. The decade was dominated, in print terms, by the brilliant aniline-red triptychs of Chikanobu, Kunichika, and Yōshū Chikanobu — vivid, theatrical, saturated with the new imported European pigments. Gekkō went deliberately in the opposite direction. He chose the muted palette of pale washi: warm creams, soft greys, dove-coloured shadows, occasional accents of indigo or ochre, allowing the natural tone of the paper itself to function as a third or fourth colour in the design. The effect is that of a watercolour painting rather than a printed image, and the comparison is deliberate — Gekkō trained as a painter first. The technical production of the series matches its visual ambition. The publisher commissioned exceptional craftsmanship: extensive bokashi gradation in skies and grounds, delicate karazuri (blind printing) for subtle textural relief, mica and metallic pigments in moons and lanterns, and a wide and unusual palette of mineral colours rather than the cheaper aniline dyes. Each print was carved from a dozen or more blocks. Sets were also issued in concertina album form, but the visual ambition of the series is most fully appreciated in individual sheets like this one, where the design occupies the centre of attention rather than competing with twenty-three siblings on facing pages. The result is a body of work that feels much closer in spirit to the shin-hanga movement of the 1910s and 1920s — to artists like Shinsui, Goyō, and Hashiguchi — than to the late Edo ukiyo-e of Gekkō's own generation. In retrospect, Bijin Hana Kurabe can be read as one of the bridges between the old world of woodblock printing and the new: a transitional masterpiece designed in 1887–1899 that already speaks the visual language of the twentieth century.