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  • “Splendid Japanese Women Artists of the Edo Period”
  • Tomi Suzuki (bio)
“Splendid Japanese Women Artists of the Edo Period”. Special Exhibition on the 120 thAnniversary of Jissen Women’s Educational Institute, at the Kōsetsu Memorial Museum, Tokyo, April 18–June 21, 2015

Only since the 1990s have the long-forgotten works of early modern Japanese women artists, both writers and painters, become the object of systematic research. The exhibition Splendid Japanese Women Artists in the Edo Period, held in Tokyo in spring-summer of 2015, introduced an impressive array of paintings by representative women artists of early modern Japan, from the seventeenth century through the nineteenth century. The artists included princesses, professional painters, and women literati from both cities and provinces.

The exhibition was the fruit of extensive research by the scholars and curators of the Kōsetsu Memorial Museum at Jissen Women’s Educational Institute, led by Professor Nakamachi Keiko, a prominent scholar of early modern Japanese art history and the director of the Museum. 1Founded in 1999, the Kōsetsu Memorial Museum has been actively rediscovering, collecting, and introducing previously little-known early modern women artists. The research by Nakamachi and her colleagues was featured in a special issue on women artists of Kokka, the most authoritative journal of Japanese and Asian art history, in 2012 (no. 1397). 2This epoch-making exhibition on early modern women painters featured twenty-six paintings (by twenty-two women artists) from the museum’s rich collection as well as several masterpieces lent from other collections. An excellent exhibition catalog describes the socio-cultural and material conditions that enabled women in a variety of positions to engage in a diverse array of artistic forms. It also addresses such questions as how gender affected the expression and content of their works, what society expected from the works created by women, and what these women hoped to achieve through their painting. 3 [End Page 155]

The Seventeenth Century

From the mid-seventeenth century, woodblock printing and book publishing flourished and literacy spread in Japan. Instructional books ( ōraimono) and tracts for women ( jokunmono) in the early modern Edo period featured Heian (9 th–12 thcentury) noble women as exemplary female models. 4The measure of a man’s high literacy was his ability to engage in Chinese studies, the Confucian classics, Chinese histories, and Chinese-style poetry. By contrast, the study of wakapoetry (31-syllable classical Japanese poetry) composed by noble men and women, as well as classical tales such as The Tale of Genji(written by a woman) and The Tale of Isebecame the core of higher education for aristocratic and high-ranking samurai daughters, and these in turn served as the foundation for paintings by women. 5Two seventeenth-century women painters who acquired wide public recognition — Ono Tsūjo (1567/8–1631) and Kiyohara Yukinobu (1643–82) — engaged in this “Japanese-style” ( wafū) cultural tradition, which had first been developed by court society and aristocratic women in the Heian period (10 th–13 thcenturies).

Ono Tsūjo, who attended to Toyotomi Hideyoshi and Tokugawa Ieyasu, the founder of the Tokugawa Shogunate, was a well-known painter and one of the representative calligraphers of what was called “the women’s brush” ( nyohitsu), which became popular in the seventeenth century. The soft, flowing, elegant kana(Japanese syllabic script) style calligraphy had been developed by Heian court nobles — both men and women — and called the “woman’s hand” ( onnade), as opposed to the “man’s hand” (Chinese script as well as Chinese-style calligraphy). Tsūjo painted figures in ink supplemented by waka classical poetry brushed with flowing, elegantly scattered kana letters.

In the early modern period, there were few female professional painters since women were excluded from the guilds of professional painters, who worked as a group in large-scale studios. A noteworthy exception is Kiyohara Yukinobu, [End Page 156]who probably worked in her own studio and was an active professional painter in the seventeenth century. Yukinobu was no doubt aided by her blood relationship to Kanō Tan’yū (1602–74), the influential founder of the early Edo-period Kanō school (which was the official painting...

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