Courtier playing ball under willow

Courtier playing ball under willow is a Japanese woodblock print associated with Ei-Q (Ei-Kyu), the artist name adopted by Sugita Hideo (1911-1960), a leading figure of Showa-period avant-garde printmaking. The image depicts a Heian-era courtier engaged in kemari, the classical court game in which players keep a leather ball aloft using only the feet, set beneath the trailing branches of a willow tree. The composition uses simplified silhouettes and a restrained palette to evoke a courtly subject from Japan's classical past, transposed into a modernist visual idiom that flattens space and emphasizes pattern over naturalistic depth. Ei-Q is most often remembered for his pioneering experiments with photograms, surrealist photography, and abstract painting through the Free Artists Association (Jiyu Bijutsuka Kyokai), but his graphic work extended into woodblock and related print media that drew on traditional Japanese themes while reworking them through a contemporary sensibility. The willow and the ball-playing courtier are motifs long established in classical Japanese painting and [ukiyo-e](/glossary/ukiyo-e), and Ei-Q's treatment here participates in the early twentieth-century reconsideration of national imagery that animated much [sosaku-hanga](/glossary/sosaku-hanga) and avant-garde printmaking in the Showa period. The reference image is preserved through ukiyo-e.org, which aggregates holdings from museum and library collections, making this an example of how the Showa-period avant-garde engaged with the Japanese woodblock tradition rather than rejecting it outright. The work rewards viewers interested in the intersection of classical subject matter and modernist form within twentieth-century Japanese prints.