Yoshitoshi • Beauties and the 7 Flowers • Ume — Plum • Japanese Woodblock Print - Japan - Meiji period (1868-1912)

Artist: Tsukioka Yoshitoshi (月岡芳年, 1839–1892)
Title: Plum (梅) — Shō-goi (Senior Fifth Rank) Nishinotoin Shigeko (正五位 西洞院成子)
Series: Bijin Shichiyōka (美人七陽華) — Beauties and the Seven Flowers

Subject: A lady of the Meiji imperial court, named and identified by rank, composing a poem on a tanzaku (poem slip) beneath flowering plum

Date: Meiji 11 (1878), 4th month — per the round todoke (御届) approval seal
Technique: Woodblock print (mokuhanga)
Publisher: Inoue Mohei (井上茂兵衛) of Hōeidō, Tokyo
Carver: Katata Hori Chō (堅田彫長) — block-cutter's seal lower right
Format: Ōban tate-e — approx. 36 × 24 cm (14¼ × 9½ in.)
Signature: Ōju Yoshitoshi ga (応需芳年画 — "drawn by Yoshitoshi)
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Condition

Excellent. A fresh, strong impression with crisp keyblock lines throughout. The colours are vivid and well-saturated — the brilliant carmine ground, the emerald-green band of grass below, the lavender-purple robe with its scrolling red tendril (karakusa) pattern, and the deep red linings all retain full intensity. The fine hair-carving (kewari) at the hairline and temples is beautifully preserved, as is the delicate diaper patterning of the white over-robe. The graded ground, from saturated carmine down to a pale horizon, is smoothly printed. The sheet is firm and intact, with only minor, even toning consistent with a print and minor trimming outside the image area.
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The Scene — A Court Poet Beneath the Plum

A young woman of the imperial court pauses mid-thought, brush poised in one hand and a slender tanzaku (poem slip) held ready in the other, while a great spray of white plum blossom arcs above her against a shock of carmine sky. The plum is the first flower of the year, blooming while snow still lies on the ground, and for centuries it has stood in Japanese and Chinese poetry for fortitude, refinement, and the scholar's elegant pursuit. To show a court beauty composing verse beneath it is to cast her, gently and flatteringly, as the inheritor of that whole literary tradition.

Yoshitoshi dresses her with great care: a richly patterned white over-robe worn open over a lavender-purple kimono threaded with red scrolling tendrils, the whole edged in deep vermilion, with chrysanthemum-form ornaments and a folded fan set into an immaculate coiffure. The tilt of the head and the slightly parted lips give her the inward, half-distracted air of someone in the act of finding a word — exactly the characterful study of women for which Yoshitoshi's later beauties are prized.
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The Series — Celebrity Portraits from Inside the Palace

Bijin Shichiyōka ("Beauties and the Seven Flowers") is one of Yoshitoshi's most distinctive beauty sets, and its premise is the real hook. Rather than the anonymous Yoshiwara courtesans of Edo-period beauty prints, each design pairs a large flowering branch with a real, named woman of the early Meiji imperial court — identified by her family name and her formal court rank. The sitter here is given as Senior Fifth Rank (shō-goi) Nishinotoin Shigeko; the Nishinotoin were a dōjō family, court aristocrats with the hereditary right to enter the palace.

In 1878 this was something close to celebrity culture. The emperor's court had only recently relocated to Tokyo, and a newly nationalist public was hungry for a glimpse inside a world that had always been hidden. A series like this functioned as a fashion plate and a society-magazine window onto the inner circle of the Empress — the late-nineteenth-century equivalent of a glossy spread on the royal household.

There is a quiet literary joke in the title, too. It evokes the famous "seven flowers" of classical poetry, yet — as specialists have noted — the plants Yoshitoshi actually chose are not the traditional seven at all. The title borrows the prestige of the old convention while doing something entirely of its own moment.