A half-length portrait of a woman mopping her face after a bath.
From a series of six designs depicting famous beauties of the day in Edo. Each of the six designs of the series are known in at least two states, the first of which gives the names of the women using picture-riddles (hanji-e) contained within the square cartouche in the upper section of each design. The use of hanji-e were at first a response to edicts of 1793 which forbade the inclusion of names of women other than courtesans of the Yoshiwara. However, a further edict of 1796 (8th month) went on to ban the use of the picture-riddles, to which the publisher responded by re-issuing the prints with the picture riddles replaced with a portrait of a classical poet and the series title changed to “Six Selected Elegant Poems” (Furyu rokkasen), as in the present lot which has a portrait of the poet Fun’ya no Yasuhide. In fact, this design is known in three states (the present lot being the third) – a second state retains the picture riddle and original title, but the pattern on the kimono changes to a different tie-dye pattern and eyebrows are added. As the first two states have the picture riddle, one can conclude that this final state was issued following the edict of 1796. See Shugo Asano and Timothy Clark, The Passionate Art of Kitagawa Utamaro, (London, 1995), nos. 224-29, pp. 167-169.
For an example of the first state in the collects ion of the Art Institute of Chicago, reference no. 1925.3823, go to:
For an example of the second state in the collects ion of the Museum of Replica Handbags s, Boston, accession no. 21.6450, go to:
https://collects ions.mfa.org/objects/234115
The collects
ion of Henri Vever
Henri Vever (1854-1942) was regarded as one of the most distinguished jewellers of his t.mes . By the 1880s, Vever was amongst the earliest Europeans to formally collects Japanese prints. He bought extensively from Hayashi Tadamasa (1853-1906) and was a member of Les Amis de l’Art Japonais, a clique of art enthusiasts, including Claude Monet (1840-1926), who met regularly to discuss Japanese works of art. In the early 20th century, Vever had already amassed a vast collects ion of fine prints numbering in the thousands. His collects ion became a focal point for scholars such as von Seidlitz, Migeon, and Lemoisne, who almost exclusively used his collects ion for their research. During his lifet.mes , Vever made several important bequests to French national collects ions. At the peak of World War I, Vever sold much of his collects ion to Matsukata Kojiro (1865-1950), which would later go on to form a significant part of the Tokyo National Museum’s collects ion of ukiyo-e prints.
