Kawamata Tsunemasa

Kawamata Tsunemasa (川又常正, active c. 1716-1751) was an early eighteenth-century Edo painter who specialized in delicate, refined depictions of beautiful women (bijinga) in the years between the Hishikawa-school foundations of single-sheet ukiyo-e and the polychrome nishiki-e revolution that Suzuki Harunobu would launch in the 1760s. Working almost exclusively in painted formats — hanging scrolls and handscrolls in ink and color on silk and paper — rather than in the woodblock medium, Tsunemasa belongs to the small but consequential group of Kyōhō- and Genbun-era ukiyo-e painters whose work bridged the courtly painted bijin tradition descending from Kaigetsudō Ando and the later eighteenth-century commercial print culture of Edo. His painted bijinga are scarce today but well-represented in major collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Tokyo National Museum, and the Cleveland Museum of Art, where they document an artist of distinct elegance and a confident command of the painted bijin idiom.

Biographical details for Tsunemasa are sparse. He is generally considered to have been a pupil of Kawamata Tsuneyuki (川又常行), the founder of the small Kawamata line of ukiyo-e painters, though scholarship has not definitively settled whether Tsunemasa was Tsuneyuki's son, adopted son, or an unrelated studio pupil who inherited the family name. The Kawamata atelier appears to have been a modest Edo studio operating in parallel with the more famous Hishikawa, Kaigetsudō, and Miyagawa workshops, and its production was almost entirely confined to painted hanging scrolls and handscrolls aimed at a private collector market rather than the commercial woodblock-print trade. Like Miyagawa Chōshun, his close contemporary, Tsunemasa worked at the moment when the Edo school of painted bijinga was at its highest development and the polychrome woodblock had not yet displaced painting as the prestige medium for floating-world subjects.

His active career spans approximately the period from 1716 to 1751, which corresponds to the Kyōhō (1716-1736) and Genbun (1736-1741) eras through the early Enkyō and Kan'en periods. This was the period when the late style of the Kaigetsudō school had matured and the painted bijinga tradition was being extended by Miyagawa Chōshun, Hanekawa Chinchō, and the Kawamata line into a more refined, intimate idiom that emphasized delicate brushwork, restrained palette, and elegant figural proportions. Tsunemasa worked at the leading edge of this stylistic refinement, and his surviving paintings document a painter capable of the highly disciplined linework and atmospheric color application that the painted bijinga genre demanded.

In subject matter, Tsunemasa stayed close to the foundational themes of painted ukiyo-e: depictions of beautiful women drawn from the licensed pleasure quarters, from upper-class samurai households, and from the literary tradition. His courtesan portraits, of which the Art Institute of Chicago's circa 1723 Courtesan and Two Attendants is a representative example, document the Yoshiwara hierarchy of the high-ranking oiran and her attendant kamuro and shinzō in the elaborate kimono and seasonal accessories that defined the genre. His genre scenes, such as the Metropolitan Museum's Two Girls Catching Fireflies, capture the more intimate seasonal pastimes of Edo women in the refined idiom that Hanekawa Chinchō and Miyagawa Chōshun had developed. His literary subjects, exemplified by the Met's painting of the Yūgao or "Evening Faces" chapter from Murasaki Shikibu's eleventh-century Tale of Genji, demonstrate Tsunemasa's engagement with the prestigious classical tradition that gave painted bijinga its cultural legitimacy.