竹久梦二 • 美人打盹 • 日本木版画 - 日本 - 20世紀

Artist: Takehisa Yumeji (竹久夢二, 1884–1934)
Title: Beauty Napping
Series: 竹久夢二木版画集 — A Collection of Takehisa Yumeji's Pictures in Woodblock Print
Technique: Woodblock print (mokuhanga), polychrome with soft bokashi shading
Date: c. 1978–1980 (after an early-20th-century Taishō painting design)
Publisher: Kyoto Hanga-in (京都版画院)
Format: Large format — ca. 45.9 x 34.6 cm
Signature & Seals: Title inscribed and Yumeji signature with red seal at lower left; series title and publisher seal (京都版画院版) in the margins; carver and printer seals at left
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IMPRESSION & COLOUR

A clean impression with excellent colours; the muted palette reads softly and clearly.

PAPER & CONDITION

Excellent. The sheet is intact.
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The Scene — A Moment of Rest

A young woman lies stretched out, her head sunk onto her folded arms, eyes closed in sleep or near-sleep. She wears a kimono of blue and violet stripes that pools softly around her shoulders; a jade-green clasp and a gilt pin catch in her loosely gathered black hair, and a flush of pink warms her cheek. Faint green leaves and small plum-dark berries are sketched into the ground beneath her. The composition is unusually intimate and close — the figure fills the long horizontal sheet almost edge to edge, drawing us right up to her resting face.

It is "Yumeji-style" beauty at its most relaxed and tender: not a posed portrait but a private, drowsy moment, rendered with the soft, economical line and gentle melancholy that are the signature of his work.
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The Series

Between roughly 1978 and 1980 the Kyoto publisher Kyoto Hanga-in (京都版画院) issued a set of twenty large-format woodblock prints drawn from Takehisa Yumeji's designs, carefully printed to capture the subtle colours and delicate shading of his original illustrations. Each sheet carries the series title and the publisher's information in the margin. This example arrives in its original printed folder.
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Takehisa Yumeji — Poet of the Taishō Beauty

Takehisa Yumeji (1884–1934) was the leading artist-illustrator of Japan's Taishō era, and a poet and songwriter besides. His romantic portraits of slender, languid young women — drawn with expressive line and a wistful, almost childlike air — were enormously popular, and he designed prints, covers, and illustrations for newspapers, women's magazines, and books. The look became known simply as "Yumeji-style" beauty.

There was little interest in his work abroad during his lifetime, but in the decades since his death Yumeji's images have been keenly sought by collectors. A museum devoted to him stands in Okayama, his birthplace.