Returned to lender The Met accepts temporary loans of art both for short-term exhibitions and for long-term display in its galleries.
Messenger Delivering a Letter (Fumitsukai byōbu-e)
Not on view
Deluxe genre paintings of this variety, dating to the early 1600s and showing courtesans of the Kyoto pleasure quarter at Shimabara, represent the first stage in the development of ukiyo-e painting and woodblock prints and illustrated books that became popular by the later seventeenth century. Here, a high-ranking courtesan with an elaborate coiffure and impressive raiment leans on an ornate armrest, as a young woman in the foreground receives what is likely a love letter. The inclusion of a small Genji painting on the sliding door is suggestive. It depicts the famous scene from Chapter 51, “A Boat Cast Adrift,” that shows Ukifune and her lover Niou in a skiff on the Uji River, perhaps implying similar romantic entanglements for these elegant women of the pleasure quarters.
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