Yamamato Shōun (山本昇雲) (artist 12/30/1870 – 05/10/1965)
Winter Peony (Kanbotan - 寒牡丹) - from the series Forms of Modern Beauties (Imasugata - いま姿)
1909
10.25 in x 15.25 in (Overall dimensions) Japanese woodblock print
Artist's seal: Shōkoku
Hagi Uragami Museum of Art
Chiba City Museum of Art -with a much heavier use of gofun
The National Museum of Asian Art - with date (3/1/1909) and publisher's seal
National Diet Library - with date and publisher's seal - click on arrow on right within the black field to see the image
Portland Art Museum The National Diet Library says of this series:
「いますがた」は、山本昇雲が明治39（1906）年から42年までの4回にわたって刊行した美人風俗画です。50点を超えるシリーズで、個々の作品の中から当時の最新風俗や江戸情緒を残した風俗を知ることができる貴重な資料といえます。
An approximate translation reads:
"Imasuteta" is a series of paintings of beautiful women and genre scenes that was published in four issues by Yamamoto Shoun between 1906 and 1942. This series of over 50 works is a valuable resource that allows us to learn about the latest fashions of the time and those that retained the atmosphere of the Edo period from each individual work.
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Donald Jenkins wrote of this print:
"...there were other artists working at the same time who knew little about Western art adn were less affected, for whatever reason, by the industrialization and modernization that was occurring in Japanese society. Winter Peony... by Yamamoto Shōun (1870-1965) is part of a series that was published from 1906 to 1909 by the venerable Tokyo publishing house, Matsui Heikichi. Little is known about Shōun other than that he was trained in several different styles of traditional Japanese art, and as a young man he designed kuchi-e (frontispieces) for popular magazines. However, a brief glance at Winter Peony reveals that it was designed by an artist working unselfconsciously within the ukiyo-e tradition. The central image of a beautiful woman under an umbrella muffled up against the cold is a direct descendant of the large-head beauties in ukiyo-e prints of the 1790s. Moreover, the subject itself refers to a ghost story that was popular in the eighteenth-century kabuki plays and ukiyo-e prints. The story is about a white heron that becomes human and falls in love, but when her lover abandons her, she disappears in the midst of an early spring snowstorm. Shōun refers to the story not only by placing his subject under an umbrella in falling snow but also by making the scarf that muffles the woman's shoulders appear to be made of feathers. The peony blooming under a protective straw cover next to a narcissus indicates the season: in Japanese, the big, wet snowflakes of spring are called botan yuki (peony snow)."
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Illustrated in:
1) a small black and white illustration in Shin-Hanga: New Prints in Modern Japan by Kendall H. Brown and Hollis Goodall-Cristante, Los Angeles County Museum of Art with the University of Washington Press, 1996, figure 16, page 26.
2) color in The Artist's Touch The Craftsman's Hand: Three Centuries of Japanese Prints from the Portland Art Museum, 2011, page 51.
3) in a small detail in color in The Sakai Collection: Ukiyo-e-gaku by Gankow Sakai, 1978, p. 51, #113.
4) color in a book review in Andon 80, June, 2006, p. 63.
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The publisher was probably Matsuki Heikichi, aka Daikokuya Heikichi. The example in the Freer/Sackler Galleries has the publisher's seal prominently printed in the lower right of their copy. However, Frederick Harris wrote in a July, 2000 issue of Andon on page 29 that: "It was during the first decade of this century that Shōun created the two beautiful series of wood block prints for which he is most famous. Imasugata (Close-up portraits of modern women) and Kodomo no asobi (Children at play). Besides these two series another unknown series Shiki no nagame (Views of four seasons) appeared about the same time. These prints published by Taihei or Ohiraban (depending on how it's read) are not completely documented. Most historians agree that lmasugata consisted of 13 half-figures and 15 close-ups (okubi) images. Kodomo no asobi is known by 34 different compositions."
modern prints (shin hanga - 新版画) (genre)
beautiful woman picture (bijin-ga - 美人画) (genre)
Daikokuya Heikichi (大黒屋平吉) (publisher)
Meiji era (明治時代: 1868-1912) (genre)
ōkubi-e (大首絵) (author)