Lot 232A
Yoshu Chikanobu Okiyo-e "Catching Sweetfish" 1895
Yoshu Chikanobu Okiyo-e "Catching Sweetfish" 1895
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Toyohara "Yoshu" Chikanobu (Japanese, 1838-1912). "Tamagawa no ayuryo" (Catching sweetfish on Tama River), woodblock print triptych, 1895. Published by Hasegawa Sonokichi. Titled at upper right of right sheet. Signed at lower right of right sheet.. A summer idyll in three woodblock sheets, all clear water and pale mountains, in which a company of elegant women wade barefoot into the shallows of the Tama River to catch ayu, the sweetfish that runs its currents in the warm months. Mount Fuji presides over the scene from the center sheet, its cone rising blue-grey above a band of sunlit haze, while willows and pines frame the banks and a cormorant fisherman works the far shallows. The women move through the composition in a rhythm of color and posture: one at left lifts a hand to steady her coiffure, another crouches at the stones, a third strides through the stream in a brown kimono scattered with cherry blossoms, a basket on her arm and her red underskirt hitched against the water. At right, a woman in a blue summer robe and white head-cloth gestures toward a companion who bends low over the riffles, fingers reaching for a darting fish, the little silver bodies of the ayu visible against the current. Size: (folded): 9.3" W x 13.8" H (23.6 cm W x 35.1 cm H); (open): 27.3" W x 13.8" H (69.3 cm W x 35.1 cm H).
The subject sits at the meeting point of two cherished traditions. The Tama River, flowing east from the mountains toward the capital, was long famous for its ayu, a delicate fish so tied to clear running water that its name became shorthand for the freshness of summer, and the river itself carried centuries of poetic association as one of the celebrated Tama waters of classical verse. By placing fashionable Meiji women in this storied landscape, Chikanobu fused bijin-ga, the art of the beautiful woman, with meisho-e, the picture of the famous place, offering his audience both the pleasure of recognizable scenery and the spectacle of contemporary grace at leisure. The hitched robes and bare calves, the parasols and patterned cottons, record the dress of the moment as carefully as any fashion plate, while the activity itself, half labor and half play, lends the print an air of unguarded ease rare in his more ceremonial work.
By 1895 Chikanobu had become the foremost designer of such refined feminine subjects, the former Sakakibara samurai and veteran of the Battle of Ueno having long since traded the sword for a reputation built on court ladies, palace customs, and beauties in landscape. The sheet shows the technical polish of his maturity, with the soft gradated printing of the sky and distant peaks set against the crisp patterning of the textiles and the cool transparency of the water. It belongs to the late efflorescence of the woodblock tradition, an art turning its gaze, in its final decades, toward the quiet pleasures of a Japan that modern life was already beginning to leave behind.
About the artist: Toyohara Chikanobu (1838-1912), born Hashimoto Naoyoshi in Echigo Province, arrived at printmaking by way of the battlefield. A retainer of the Sakakibara clan of Takada Domain, he fought as a Shogitai loyalist in the Battle of Ueno and later at the Goryokaku star fort in Hakodate during the final, doomed stand of the Tokugawa order, earning a reputation for personal bravery before the new Meiji government made samurai careers obsolete. The sword exchanged for the brush, he traveled to Tokyo in 1875, found work illustrating for the Kaishin Shimbun, and built a prolific parallel practice in nishiki-e woodblock printing.
His training traced an unusually layered lineage: early study in the Kano school of painting, followed by instruction under a disciple of Keisai Eisen, then the workshop of Utagawa Kuniyoshi (under whom he called himself Yoshitsuru), and finally Kunisada, before studying nigao-e portraiture with Toyohara Kunichika, whose name he adopted into his own art name, Yoshu Chikanobu.
He worked across a remarkable range of subjects: warrior prints and war reportage, kabuki actor portraits, scenic views, historical pageant, and the genre that made him a household name, bijinga, images of beautiful women. His series on women's fashion and court life inside the Imperial Palace at Chiyoda captured an audience hungry for glimpses of a world few could enter. His "Mirror of Ages" (1897) traced the evolution of women's hairstyles across eras with the precision of a social historian and the eye of a colorist. When he died in 1912, the Miyako Shimbun mourned that Edo-e, the great Tokyo woodblock tradition, had perished with him.
Provenance: private Las Vegas, Nevada, USA collection
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Item #
195209
- Condition: Fair. Panels are connected with left two panels mounted to a backing board; right-most panel missing backing board. Some areas of staining and discoloring, as well as tears and small losses at edges and folds. Otherwise, nice remaining imagery and detail.
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