The young girl depicted is walking past a bamboo grove heavily laden with snow. Elegantly dressed in a robe decorated with plum blossoms amongst stylised waters, she ties the cord of her broad straw hat under chin.

This is a second state of this print lacking the commissioner’s signature, the black outlines of the snow removed, and using a darker grey palette for the background. For an example of the first state in the collects ion of The Art Institute of Chicago, reference number 1925.2053, go to:

https://www.artic.edu/artworks/20844/passing-the-bamboo-grove

Or see:

Jack Hillier, Suzuki Harunobu: An Exhibition of his Colour Prints and Illustrated Books on the Occasion of the Bicentenary of his Death in 1770, (Philadelphia, 1970), no. 37, p. 85.

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.