Spring by a Pond

ENOMOTO Chikatoshi was born in Tokyo and in 1916 he started to study under KABURAKI Kiyokata. He graduated in Japanese Painting from the Tokyo Fine Arts School in 1921 and the following year had a work selected for the 4th Teiten (Imperial Art Exhibition). Subsequent to this, he showed works featuring young women enjoying modern life in the Teiten and Shin Bunten (New Ministry of Education Art Exhibition).
The work on display here was first shown in the 13th Teiten exhibition. The subject of two young women demonstrating new customs was one of Chikatoshi’s favorites and in this work we see such eye-catching objects as a fox stole, a parasol, a cine camera and a Chinese stool, combined with such traditional Japanese motifs as irises and mandarin ducks, to create a strange scene. What particularly attracts the eye is the woman wearing a black dress and bright yellow Japanese jacket. The fashion magazines of the time, both in Europe and Japan, featured photographs of women wearing kimono over bathing costumes and this picture demonstrates that the artist must have heard about this fashion and used his imagination to recreate it in his painting. It was his specialty to combine young women and fashion items in this way, another example shows two women in their best clothes playing with yo-yos in front of a Christmas tree (‘Yo-yo gi’ - in the collection of the Iwami Art Museum) while yet another shows a young woman in a kimono swinging a golf club.