Fukuda Chiyo-ni 福田 千代尼 Kaga no Chiyo 加賀 千代女 - "The Dawn", Daimyō, Signatures and Seals, Haiku Poetry with Haiga Verses - 1730

Fukuda Chiyo-ni 福田 千代尼
Kaga no Chiyo 加賀 千代女
"Die Morgenröte" 夜明け"

Haiku-poetry and painting with haiga verses
Original signatures
Province of Kaga, around 1730-1750

+ 2 folded double leaves with painting
+ 3 leaves with painting
+1 folded double leaf with haiga verses and red seals

Unique on rice paper
HAND-COLORED

Size of double leaf: approx. 44.5 cm x 15 cm
Size of double leaves with paintings: each 25 cm x 24.5 cm and 29 cm x 23 cm
Size of leaves with paintings: 25 cm x 16 cm and 24 cm x 8.5 cm and 11.5 cm x 8 cm

Kaga no Chiyojo (* 1703 Hakusan, Kaga Province; died October 2, 1775, Kaga Province) was a Japanese poet and a Buddhist nun.

She is widely regarded as one of the greatest female haiku poets (at that time still called hokku).
Among Chiyo’s most remarkable works are "Toward the Dawn" (The Dawn), "Pinning Up My Hair" and "Again the Women".

As one of the few female haiku poets in premodern Japanese literature, Chiyo-ni was considered an influential figure. Before her time, haiku by women was often dismissed and ignored. At the age of seven she began writing haiku, and by seventeen she was very popular all over Japan. Chiyo-ni wrote throughout her life. Influenced by the famous poet Matsuo Bashō, yet ambitious and an independent figure with a unique voice, Chiyo-ni’s engagement not only paved the way for her career but also opened the path for other women to follow. Chiyo-ni is known as the “pioneer who played a role in promoting cultural exchange with Korea.”

Perhaps she is best known for this haiku:
Dawn
The well-wrapped bucket,
I ask for water

Parents older than I
are now my children
the same cicadas

Listening,
It’s okay not to listen, too...
Nightingale

Today the Dawn is a favorite flower among people in her hometown, because she left a series of poems about this flower. At Shokouji Temple in Hakusan her personal belongings are on display.

Chiyo-ni was born in February 1703 in Matto, Kaga Province (today Hakusan, Ishikawa Prefecture) as the eldest daughter of a scroll-mounting craftsman. From a young age Chiyo-ni was familiar with art and poetry, and at seven she began writing haiku. By seventeen she had become very popular in Japan for her poems.

Her poems, though mostly about nature, work toward a unity of nature and humanity. Her own life was that of a haikai poet who made his life and the world he lived in one with himself and led a simple and modest life. She was able to make connections by being attentive and by carefully studying and writing down the unique things in her ordinary world.

It may be that Chiyo-ni lived with her aging parents after the death of her husband, caring for them and working in the family business, mounting scrolls.

After the death of her parents she was adopted by a couple to continue the family business, and in 1754, at the age of fifty-two (according to East Asian age reckoning), Chiyo-ni decided to become a Buddhist nun. "Not" to renounce the world, but to teach her heart how to be the clear water that flows day and night. Chiyo-ni shaved her head and lived with other nuns in a temple and took the Buddhist name Soen.
She continued writing and spent the rest of her simple but peaceful life in the manner of Haikai.

In 1764 she was chosen to prepare the official gift for Maeda Shigemichi, the regional daimyō, to the Korean delegation led by the Minister Jo Eom.
Chiyo-ni created and delivered 21 works of art based on her twenty-one haiku.

You are bidding on these originals haiku writings with haiga paintings and signatures.

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