Artist: Kajita Hanko 梶田半古 (1870–1917) Titel: Beauty and Stone Water Basin — "Senkintei" (as acquired) — a young woman at a garden chōzubachi Technique: Woodblock print (mokuhanga) — kuchi-e, bijin-ga; Period: 1901 Format: Kuchi-e (frontispiece), approx. 30 × 22 cm (11¾ × 8⅝ in.) Condition: Very good colour. Minor soiling. Light overall toning, two folds as usual for a frontispiece of this period. ------------------------------------------ Description: A young woman crouches at the edge of a low stone water basin in an autumn garden, one hand lifted to her hair, her head tilted down toward the water. She wears a fine purple-and-white striped kimono over a blue obi patterned in yellow and brown; the striping is printed as hundreds of separate short strokes, which is the technical showpiece of the sheet. Behind her a stone lantern stands half-hidden in clipped shrubbery, white chrysanthemums are in flower, and an old tree leans in from the right with its remaining leaves turned to rust and ochre. Bamboo grass fringes the stepping stones in the foreground. Everything to the left is empty paper — pale, flat, faintly mottled — so that the whole weight of the composition sits in the right two-thirds and the woman is left with a wide, silent space to look into. She is doing what women in this genre are so often doing at a basin: using the still water as a mirror, adjusting her hair. Hanko gives it no drama at all. There is no second figure, no incident, no text — only a private moment in a garden at the turning of the year, and the relationship between a small bent figure and a great deal of nothing. --------------------------------------------- About Kajita Hanko and the woodblock frontispiece Kuchi-e were the woodblock frontispieces bound into Meiji novels and literary magazines around the turn of the twentieth century — a genre of roughly thirty years, worked by more than 150 illustrators, of whom only a handful now matter. Hanko is one of them. Trained first under the ukiyo-e painter Nabeta Gyokuei and then in the Shijō manner, he came up through commercial design work before making his name as an illustrator in the 1890s, and he belongs with Tomioka Eisen, Takeuchi Keishū and Mizuno Toshikata in the first generation of the form. What separates Hanko from his contemporaries is restraint. Where the others fill the sheet, he strips the background back to almost nothing and lets negative space carry the mood — an approach that reads as strikingly modern beside the more conventionally ukiyo-e manner of his peers, and which is exactly what is happening in this design. His illustrations for Kosugi Tengai's Mafū koifū made him a star; his drawings of schoolgirls were popular enough to be known simply as "Hanko's schoolgirls." He came to resent the reputation, wanting to be taken seriously as a Nihonga painter, and spent his later years teaching — his pupils included Kobayashi Kokei, Maeda Seison and Okumura Togyū, three of the major Japanese painters of the following generation. Because these plates were folded into bindings, most carry one or two folds and light toning; this is a characteristic of the genre rather than a defect. The field was long neglected and has been seriously collected only since Merritt and Yamada's study of 2000, with Yamada Nanako's dedicated volume on Hanko's kuchi-e following in 2014.