Artist: Mizuno Toshikata
Date: 1893
Museum: Te Papa (Wellington, New Zealand)
Technique: Woodcut
As a student of the famous Yoshitoshi, and later his colleague in illustrating the newspaper Yamato Shinbun, 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 kuchi-e (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 Yuagari, Kansei koro fujin (After the bath: Woman of the Kansei era) places the bijin-ga (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 iki. The presence of the cat, celebrated in Japan as an emblem of good luck and protection, reinforces the viewer
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