Maiko (Female Performer)

The artist himself—in his inscription cursively brushed on the box lid—gave this work the title of Maiko 舞妓, literally, “female performer of dance,” but which refers more broadly to young female entertainers, usually age 17 to 20, in Kyoto and Western Japan, who are training to be professional geisha. Tsunetomi is known to have been a habitue of the pleasure quarters of Kyoto and Osaka, and painted numerous portrayals of women entertainers throughout his caree. Maiko and geisha were popular subjects of modern bijinga (paintings of beautiful women) of the early twentieth century. Here the maiko is captured in a seated, relaxed pose and calls to mind his celebrated painting After a Bath (Yokugo) of 1912, just a few years before this work, which shows a young woman kneeling on a veranda.

Paintings such as these, sympathetically depicting young women with relatable facial expressions, helped establish Tsunetomi’s reputation as an innovator of a new type of bijin painting. In Maiko, the artist succeeds in connoting a sense of the corporeal body underneath the kimono, indicating his grasp of realistic techniques of Western-style painting. The eye-catching juxtaposition of black and red in this composition is a feature of many of his Taishō-period paintings. As was the custom of many Nihonga artists, Tsunetomi often created multiple works with essentially the same composition. For instance, another nearly identical version of Maiko is found in the collection of Nara Prefectural Museum (see Hashizume Setsuya, Kitano Tsunetomi ten (2003), pl. 27).

Born in Kanazawa, from an early age Tsunetomi trained as an engraver for newspaper printing. He moved to Osaka and became successful at newspaper illustration, while continuing to study painting. His early submissions to the government sponsored Bunten exhibitions of the early 1910s were high sensual paintings of geisha and courtesans and revealed his earlier study of Western-style oil painting. In 1917, Tsunetomi became a member of the Japan Art Institute (Nihon Bijutsuin) and his painting style gradually changed into a more introspective, idealized renditions of women. As one of the first Nihonga painters from Osaka to achieve national recognition, he played a major role in energizing Osaka painting circles and became a mentor to many local artists.