Messenger Delivering a Letter (Fumitsukai byōbu-e)
Returned to lender
This work of art was on loan to the museum and has since been returned to its lender.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.
Artwork Details
- 文使い図屏風
- Title: Messenger Delivering a Letter (Fumitsukai byōbu-e)
- Artist: Unidentified artist
- Period: Edo period (1615–1868)
- Date: second quarter of the 17th century
- Culture: Japan
- Medium: Two-panel folding screen; ink, color, and gold on paper
- Dimensions: Image: 56 1/2 × 60 13/16 in. (143.5 × 154.5 cm)
- Classification: Screens
- Credit Line: Lent by Princeton University Art Museum. Museum purchase, gift of William R. McAlpin, Class of 1926
- Curatorial Department: Asian Art