Artist: Takeuchi Keishu (武内桂舟, 1861–1943) — also romanised Takeuchi Keishū; born Takeuchi Ginpei Title: "Carp Streamer" (Koinobori) — a beauty and child with a Boys' Day carp streamer Technique: Kuchi-e — nishiki-e woodblock frontispiece Date: c. 1900s–1910s (Meiji era) Format: Kuchi-e, approx. 22 × 30 cm Signature: Red artist's seal Keishū (lower left) ---------------------------------------------------------------- Paper & condition Very good condition. Noticeable warm toning across the sheet, which is entirely normal for a print more than a century old. Colours remain fresh. Please see the image carefully ------------------------------------------------------- The scene — a carp streamer for the Boys' Festival A young woman in a soft blue-grey striped kimono turns her head, lips slightly parted, as she and a child behind her hoist a great cloth koinobori — the carp-shaped streamer flown for the Boys' Festival (Tango no Sekku) on the fifth day of the fifth month. The carp fills the left half of the sheet: mouth agape, scales rendered in graded ochre, black and grey, its body swelling as if catching the wind. Behind it a second streamer or banner unfurls in bright blue, scattered with white and green spirals of foaming water. The child peers out shyly from behind the woman's shoulder, one small face half-hidden by the fish. About the artist & kuchi-e Kuchi-e (口絵, "opening pictures") are the woodblock frontispieces bound into Japanese novels and literary magazines around the turn of the twentieth century — a last brilliant flowering of the ukiyo-e tradition, mostly depicting bijin but recast with the Western-inflected sensibility of the Meiji age. The literary magazine Bungei Kurabu was the first to feature them regularly, carrying well over two hundred between 1895 and 1914, most in exactly this 22 × 30 cm format folded in thirds. Takeuchi Keishu stands among the founders of the genre. The second son of a retainer of the Kishū daimyō, he came to printmaking by an unusual route — he trained in Kanō-school painting, then earned his living painting export porcelain before turning to woodblock illustration. Through a chance introduction he became a pupil of the great Tsukioka Yoshitoshi, who gave him the art name Toshisuke; his name appears on Yoshitoshi's memorial. As art editor for Bungei Kurabu he contributed some sixty-five kuchi-e, and his close friendship with the novelist Ozaki Kōyō — leader of the Ken'yūsha literary circle — led him to illustrate Kōyō's celebrated Konjiki Yasha (The Gold Demon). His influence carried forward through his own pupils, above all Kaburagi Kiyokata, who in turn taught Itō Shinsui, Torii Kotondo and Kawase Hasui — so that the whole modern lineage of bijin-ga and shin-hanga can be traced back, in part, to Keishu's studio.