明治時代の三人の女性 — 三味線、裁縫箱、そして本 - Japan - Meiji period (1868-1912)

Artist: Attributed to Yōshū (Toyohara) Chikanobu 楊洲周延 (1838–1912) — unsigned; see notes

Title: Untitled. Known from the three role cartouches:
– Right: 藝妓 geigi — a geisha
– Centre: 「〇家の姫」 — the daughter of a great house
– Left: 令嬢 reijō — a young lady

Subject: Three types of Meiji womanhood, each with an accompanying verse
Format: Ōban tate-e, approx. 36 × 24 cm
Technique: Nishiki-e (full-colour woodblock print) on Japanese paper
Date: Meiji 20 (1887) — printed 1st May, published 21st May, per the imprint at lower left
Publisher: Ōkura Magobei 大倉孫兵衛, Nihonbashi, Tokyo — his gourd-shaped publisher's cartouche at lower left
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Condition

Crisp impression with clean, well-registered colour — the indigo stripes, the appliqué patterning on the furisode and the printed cotton of the Western dress all read sharply. Toning to the paper overall. Minor crease and minor soiling area. Please check the images!
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The Design

By 1887 the question of what a woman should wear had become, in Tokyo, a question about what Japan was going to be. The Rokumeikan had been open four years; the Empress had appeared publicly in Western dress the previous spring and issued a memorandum encouraging other women to follow. Chikanobu — who had fought for the shogunate at Ueno and Hakodate before turning to the brush, and who spent the rest of his life drawing the world that had defeated him — became the great chronicler of exactly this transition.

Here he sets three women against a bare ground and lets their possessions do the arguing. At right stands the geisha, in a striped indigo kimono, one hand steadying the neck of her shamisen: the professional, whose art is the old art. Behind and above her, the daughter of a great house, in a spectacular layered kimono of pale green, lavender and scarlet, turns from an open sewing box, red cloth still in her hands — needlework, the accomplishment a mother taught a daughter and had taught her own. And seated in front of both, a reijō in a brown bustle dress with a ruffled hem and a blue skirt, gloved, on a Western chair, holding an open book.

Nothing is condemned and nothing is celebrated. The three are simply placed in the same air, and the composition lets you notice that the woman in Western clothes is the one who is reading — and that she is seated, while the other two stand. Three verses accompany them, one to each figure.

It is a beautifully printed thing quite apart from its argument: the pattern work on the furisode is exceptionally fine, and the contrast between the flat, dense indigo of the geisha's stripes and the fussy printed cotton of the bustle dress is a piece of deliberate craft, not accident.