The 555 Artworks of media Silk and containing the word shibata zeshin, silk, 1800

A study in contrasts, this diptych portrays the two Children’s Day festivals that are held every year in Japan. Zeshin has painted the Girls’ Day celebration, also known as the Dolls’ Festival or Hina matsuri, in a peasant’s thatched cottage. The brown leaves on the tree, the straw piled up after th...

Like

Buy

In the Japanese poetic tradition, waka (thirty-one-syllable court verse) often invokes the image of a solitary deer traipsing through fallen leaves or autumn flowers as a metaphor for lost love. Here, a lonesome-seeming stag has paused on a moonlit evening, as if to listen for the call of its mate. ...

Like

Buy

This painting's design is taken from Zeshin's print series Hana kurabe. The sewing box and thread clippers at the top imply that the butterfly-like toys have just been made. The pink Chinese milk-vetch flowers convey the spring atmosphere familiar to everyday life.

Like

Buy

A simple yet alluring composition by Zeshin captures a trio of crows in flight, with a sense of perspective conveyed by varying the tones of ink. The artist often took up the subject of crows, as seen also in the two-panel gold-leaf screen with three crows and two egrets. This painting is signed “Ze...

Like

Buy

A young woman in a sheer kimono sits on a bamboo bench alongside a pond, fanning herself to allay the summer heat. She has kicked off one of her geta sandals, and bent her left leg into a relaxed pose. Fully bloomed irises in the marshy pond indicate the fifth lunar month, the middle of summer.The c...

Like

Buy

Fa Ruozhen is known for his fantastical mountainscapes permeated with clouds. This imposing landscape, painted in 1684 when the artist was seventy-two years old and still in his prime, is an exceptionally well-realized composition by this important scholar-artist of the early Qing dynasty. While mos...

Like

Buy

This pair of hanging scrolls, though separated recently as is apparent from their different mountings, once formed part of a triptych flanking a central scroll that depicted the Daoist immortal Lu Dongbin (now in the Nelson-Atkins Museum, Kansas City). This schema, cultivated and popular in Zen temp...

Like

 

Shibata Zeshin was the outstanding Japanese lacquer artist and painter of the nineteenth century. An energetic and prolific artist, he earned distinction during his lifetime for paintings that showed unusual creativity. Zeshin painted several works in which animals mimic human behavior. By demonstra...

Like

Buy

This painting of a slender, pensive-looking courtesan standing on a veranda in a light snowfall is indicative of Hōitsu’s early training in Ukiyo-e painting. The woman’s gesture, of raising the layered collars of her garb with concealed hands to veil the lower part of her face, appears in Ukiyo-e pa...

Like

Buy

The dress was made of rayon jersey, treated in bias cut to fit around the body. The surrounding sash has the effect of highlighting the sleek body. The dress is from Madeleine Vionnet/

Like

 

In 1928, when Elizabeth Hawes opened her salon in New York City, American women looked to Paris for couture garments, and American designers were copying the designs of the French couturiers. Hawes, however, constructed her designs to fit her clients/

Like