Ono no Komachi

Created in 1994, this bijin-ga depicts Ono no Komachi, the celebrated Heian-period poet (fl. ninth century) who became one of the Rokkasen — the Six Poetry Immortals — and a stock figure of feminine beauty and melancholy in Japanese art and theater. Komachi is conventionally shown as an aged woman in later iconography — her pride humbled by time — or as a court beauty in her youth, dressed in layered junihitoe robes. Bull's version, produced two years before he completed his landmark reproduction of the Ishiyama-gire anthology, draws on the classical figural tradition. The layered kosode and court dress would require multiple precisely registered color blocks to render the successive garment layers, while the figure's posture and facial expression carry the emotional weight of a subject whose literary associations were familiar to every educated Japanese viewer.