Yuagari, Kansei koro fujin. (After the bath: Woman of the Kansei era). From the series Thirty-six...

As a student of the famous Yoshitoshi, and later his colleague in illustrating the newspaper <em>Yamato Shinbun</em>, Mizuno Toshikata (1866-1908) was well-equipped to bring a theatrical sense of dramatic conflict to his early reportage of the Sino-Japanese and Russo-Japanese Wars. Later, however, he focused his creative activities mainly on domestic scenes and illustrations of romantic intrigue for popular novels or newspaper serials. Toshikata developed a new vision in these compositions. His <em>kuchi-e</em> (literally: ‘mouth piece’ frontispiece prints) heralded a new discourse on the social construction of girlhood and womanhood in its focus on sentimental Western notions of romantic love.

His 1893 composition <em>Yuagari, Kansei koro fujin</em> (<em>After the bath: Woman of the Kansei era</em>) places the <em>bijin-ga</em> (pictures of beautiful women) subject in the decorous world of the middle-class home, rather than the world of entertainments and looser morals. His vision is sentimental and a little ethereal. The former quality reflects the tenor of contemporary popular literature, the latter the fluid transparency of Satsuma porcelain painting, in which Toshikata had trained. His works also maintain sensibilities from earlier eras. The casual intimacy of this view of a woman after the bath echoes the provocative chic sensibility of the Edo ethos of <em>iki</em>. The presence of the cat, celebrated in Japan as an emblem of good luck and protection, reinforces the viewer's sense of familiarity here. Toshikata's intimate scenes provide evocative, atmospheric contexts for representations of pensive figures. His Kansei era (1789–1801) woman seems quietly melancholic, lost in her own thoughts in a moment of private reverie.

Sources:

David Bell, 'A new vision: modern Japanese prints from the Heriot collection', <em>Tuhinga</em>, 31 (2020), forthcoming.

David Bell and Mark Stocker, 'Rising sun at Te Papa: the Heriot collection of Japanese art', <em>Tuhinga</em>, 29 (2018), pp. 55-56.

Dr Mark Stocker  Curator, Historical International Art   May 2019