Geisha

This sanguine drawing on paper depicts a young geisha in the full formal kimono and obi of one of the elite Tokyo hanamachi (geisha districts), most likely Shinbashi or Asakusa as Iacovleff was working principally in those quarters of the city during 1918 and 1919. The figure is shown in three-quarter view, the head tilted slightly downward in the conventional pose of the o-zashiki (private banquet) entertainer, with the hair dressed in the elaborate shimada chignon and ornamented with the kanzashi (hairpins) appropriate to her status. The drawing is a characteristic example of Iacovleff's Japanese cycle of feminine portraiture, working in the soft sanguine chalk drawing he had learned from Dmitri Kardovsky at the Imperial Academy and that he had refined through his Italian-Spanish travels of 1914. As with his portraits of kabuki actors, Iacovleff registers with documentary precision the conventions of his sitter's dress — the layered collars, the elaborately tied obi, the particular set of the head — while translating the image into the soft chalk vocabulary of European academic life drawing. The drawing belongs to a substantial sub-series of geisha portraits within the Japanese cycle and represents one of the most sustained European artistic responses to the Tokyo geisha world of the late Taishō period.