Kawai Gyokudō 川合玉堂 (1873–1957) Title: すず風 Suzukaze — "Cool Breeze" Source: Kuchi-e (frontispiece) for Bungei Kurabu 文芸倶楽部, vol. 9 no. 12, September 1903 (Meiji 36); published by Hakubunkan 博文館, Tokyo Technique: Woodblock print (mokuhanga) — kuchi-e Period: Meiji era Format: Kuchi-e, approx. 30 × 22 cm; Signature: Gyokudō 玉堂, with the artist's red seal Condition: Minor soiling at the bottom margin, minor trimming at the upper margin. Light overall toning, two folds as usual for a frontispiece of this period; The composition is very well preserved! Please check the images! ------------------------------------------ Description: A young woman sits on a rough wooden bench in a garden at dusk, one geta slipped half off her foot, looking up and away at nothing in particular. She wears a light cotton summer kimono strewn with blue blossoms and a wine-red obi; a large pale hound sits against her knee, ears down, watching the same nothing. Behind them the shrubbery is printed as flat blue-grey silhouette, layer behind layer, with a spray of fine grasses drawn in pale line at the upper right — a bokashi dusk that puts the two figures in the only lit part of the sheet. The name on it is worth pausing over. Kawai Gyokudō trained in Kyoto under Kōno Bairei and Mochizuki Gyokusen before moving to Tokyo, and went on to become one of the defining Nihonga landscape painters of his generation — a Bunten and Teiten juror, professor at the Tokyo School of Fine Arts from 1915, and eventually a recipient of the Order of Culture. The frontispieces he supplied to Bungei Kurabu around the turn of the century belong to the early, jobbing part of that career, and they are a slightly odd corner of it: Gyokudō was a landscapist by instinct, not a bijin specialist, and it shows here in the way the garden is given as much attention as the woman. The dog — an unmistakably Western sporting breed, not a Japanese chin or shiba — is the other tell. This is a Meiji garden, with Meiji imports in it, drawn by an artist whose real subject was always the space around the figure.