Kobayakawa Kiyoshi
Sleepy, 1930s
Hanging scroll; ink and mineral pigments on silk
Overall size 88 x 25¼ in. (223 x 64 cm)
Image size 57½ x 19¾ in. (146 x 50 cm)
Image size 57½ x 19¾ in. (146 x 50 cm)
T-4861
Signed at lower right Kiyoshi e (Painted by Kiyoshi) and sealed Kiyoshi Comes with a fitted paulownia-wood tomobako storage box Kobayakawa Kiyoshi was a student of the conservative artist Kaburagi...
Signed at lower right Kiyoshi e (Painted by Kiyoshi) and sealed Kiyoshi
Comes with a fitted paulownia-wood tomobako storage box
Kobayakawa Kiyoshi was a student of the conservative artist Kaburagi Kiyokata (1878-1972), a specialist in chaste, mannered paintings of beautiful women and a key figure in the twentieth-century revival of the ukiyo-e style. Unlike his master, however, Kobayakawa also produced many graphic works that were more intimate and erotically charged, such as the now much sought-after woodblock print Horoyoi (Tipsy, 1930), a study of a fashionable young woman in a polka-dot dress, cigarette in hand with a cocktail on the table before her, set against a dramatic red background.
Yet Kobayakawa was better known and respected in his lifetime for his paintings that usually depicted traditional female entertainers, exhibiting 19 times at the Teiten official national salon and its successors from 1924, throughout a decade of war, and until the year before his untimely death in 1948. These often feature old-time settings such as the pleasure quarters of Edo (present-day Tokyo) or the residences of Dutch merchants confined to the small island of Deshima in Nagasaki on Kyushu, Japan’s southernmost main island.
In this hanging scroll that probably dates from quite late in his short career Kobayakawa seems to abandon all sense of a historical setting, instead depicting a geisha or other professional entertainer of the present day seated on the floor before her dressing table, her under-kimono slightly disheveled, taking a nap by the dim light of a bare electric light shaded only by a scrap of cloth. In place of the precise, detailed, print-like lines often seen in his paintings, the artist has chosen a looser, more impressionistic effect.
In an article published in 1935, Kobayakawa observed that he collected prints by famous masters from the eighteenth into the nineteenth century, explaining that his aim, just like the earlier print artists, was to portray the customs of the time, not through posed studio-like portraits but by capturing “an accidental pose from one moment of life.”
Comes with a fitted paulownia-wood tomobako storage box
Kobayakawa Kiyoshi was a student of the conservative artist Kaburagi Kiyokata (1878-1972), a specialist in chaste, mannered paintings of beautiful women and a key figure in the twentieth-century revival of the ukiyo-e style. Unlike his master, however, Kobayakawa also produced many graphic works that were more intimate and erotically charged, such as the now much sought-after woodblock print Horoyoi (Tipsy, 1930), a study of a fashionable young woman in a polka-dot dress, cigarette in hand with a cocktail on the table before her, set against a dramatic red background.
Yet Kobayakawa was better known and respected in his lifetime for his paintings that usually depicted traditional female entertainers, exhibiting 19 times at the Teiten official national salon and its successors from 1924, throughout a decade of war, and until the year before his untimely death in 1948. These often feature old-time settings such as the pleasure quarters of Edo (present-day Tokyo) or the residences of Dutch merchants confined to the small island of Deshima in Nagasaki on Kyushu, Japan’s southernmost main island.
In this hanging scroll that probably dates from quite late in his short career Kobayakawa seems to abandon all sense of a historical setting, instead depicting a geisha or other professional entertainer of the present day seated on the floor before her dressing table, her under-kimono slightly disheveled, taking a nap by the dim light of a bare electric light shaded only by a scrap of cloth. In place of the precise, detailed, print-like lines often seen in his paintings, the artist has chosen a looser, more impressionistic effect.
In an article published in 1935, Kobayakawa observed that he collected prints by famous masters from the eighteenth into the nineteenth century, explaining that his aim, just like the earlier print artists, was to portray the customs of the time, not through posed studio-like portraits but by capturing “an accidental pose from one moment of life.”