Tanabata Eve, Taisho era, 1920s

Yoshikawa Kanpō
Tanabata Eve, Taisho era, 1920s
Two-panel folding screen;ink, mineral colors shell powder, and gold on silk
Size 70½ x 80½ in. (179 x 204.5 cm)
T-4942

Published and Exhibited:
Ogawa Tomoko and Minami Yukiko eds., Japan Beauty: Enchanting Bijinga Paintings Treasured in a Private Collection, Tokyo, Saitama, and Hiroshima, 2013, cat. no. 36

Formerly in the collection of the Juraku Dyeing and Weaving Museum, this work was shown at a Yoshikawa Kanpō exhibition held in 1972 in the special display space at Nara Prefectural Cultural Hall. It shows a mother and child looking at a sheet of paper that flies up into the air, caught by a breeze. The mother lets her child play at her side while she reads a work of women’s literature based on the famous medieval anthology Ogura Hyakunin isshu (100 Poems by 100 Poets) entitled Gingyoku Ogura shikishi (Poem Papers of Jewels from the Ogura Anthology) by an eighteenth-century author named Terada Yoemon.
We can imagine that she might be thinking about the meaning of a poem in the anthology that relates to the Tanabata Star Festival, held on the seventh day of the seventh month, such as Ōtomo Yakamochi’s Kasasagi no / wataseru hashi ni / oku shimo no / shiroki o mireba / yo zo fukinikeru (When I see the whiteness of the frost that lies on the bridge the magpies spread, then do I know, indeed, that the night has deepened; translation by Joshua D. Mostow). In common with the work of Okamoto Shinsō (1894–1933), Yoshikawa’s short-lived classmate at the Kyoto Municipal Painting School, this screen richly conveys a special strand of aestheticism that is characteristic of the Taisho period