Each panel signed and sealed at lower left Shōtō 松濤 with two seals, the first Yoshifuji no in吉藤之印, the second Shōtō 松濤

The subjects of this screen, Oharame, were traditional women wood‑gatherers from the mountain villages north of Kyoto. Active from the medieval period onward, they became emblematic figures in the cultural imagination of the old capital. Oharame embodied both the rigors of rural labor and a distinctive rustic grace, features here charmingly embodied in the contrasted left- and right-hand panels. Descending steep mountain paths into Kyoto, they carried bundles of firewood balanced on their heads or loaded into bamboo baskets on their backs.

The characteristic clothing of the Oharame—indigo garments, straw sandals, white leggings, and white headcloths wrapped around a Pompadour‑style Shimada‑mage coiffure, plus (when bearing particularly heavy loads) a padded ring of plaited straw such as that seen lying to one side in the left-hand screen—came to symbolize Kyoto’s enduring connection to the surrounding hilly terrain and to the women whose work sustained its daily life. Their image inspired no less a genius than Katsushika Hokusai, as well as numerous twentieth-century Kyoto artists, from leading painters such as Takeuchi Seihō to Shin Hanga printmakers including Itō Shinsui and Kawase Hasui, as well as photographic pioneer Ogawa Kazumasa (Isshin), all of whom contributed to the romanticized yet deeply rooted visual legacy of the Oharame. Tourist re-enactments of their appearance and lifestyle remain popular even today.

Despite its use of mineral pigments on silk—a medium typically associated with Nihonga (neo‑nativist painting)—the decidedly Western idiom of this screen suggests an attribution to the little‑known Yōga (Western‑style) painter Matsuo Shōtō, whose career was brought to light in 2006 through an exhibition in his native Saga Prefecture on the island of Kyushu. Born in Kuma Village, Tsugōri (now Shioda‑chō, Kanzaki City), Matsuo is said to have studied at art academies in both the Soviet Union and Spain, and to have shown his work in the United Kingdom, France, Belgium, Argentina, and Japan. 1

His painting Amitsukuroi 網繕ひ, a study of a fisherman mending his nets, was accepted for the first time into the Twelfth Bunten exhibition in 1918. 2 At that time he was recorded as living in Tokyo, remaining in Suginami Ward until 1943, when a fire destroyed his home along with some 300 of his works. Very few surviving paintings are known today, apart from a handful of early plein‑air studies preserved in Saga Prefecture. Among his extant works, the most substantial is a large oil‑on‑canvas mountain landscape (23 × 72 in.; Saga Prefectural Art Museum). Another known piece—a still life showing a Noh mask, drum, and related accouterments, signed in roman script Shoto Matsuo—was exhibited in 2006. He is also thought to have submitted a work titled Dawn on the Farm to an exhibition in France.