Index for the series Streaked Mist (Yae gasumi)

The Index for the series Streaked Mist (Yae gasumi 八重霞), dated 1906 and held by the Honolulu Museum of Art's Richard Lane Collection (accession 2005.0680), is the frontispiece sheet to one of Ikeda Shōen's most ambitious commercial print projects: a twelve-print color woodblock album of refined bijin-ga published by Kokkeidō (Akiyama Buemon) in late Meiji Tokyo. Streaked Mist appeared at a moment when commercial Tokyo print publishers were testing how far the technical resources of nineteenth-century nishiki-e — multiple block registrations, graded color washes, lacquer-printed ink (urushi-zuri), silver mica overlays for hair ornaments, and blind embossing — could be pushed in the service of the new bijin-ga sensibility being developed by Toshikata's students. Shōen's prints in the series depict a woman in different seasonal moments — under spring rain with a black umbrella, viewing autumn maples, attending to a letter, walking past a flowering tree — each in the oban yoko-e (horizontal large-sheet) format of 9 5/8 by 14 5/8 inches (24.6 by 37.2 centimeters). The index sheet sets out the cycle's full program, naming and ordering the plates so that owners could orient themselves within the album as a coherent set. The Honolulu Museum of Art's complete set, acquired with the Richard Lane Collection, is one of the most important institutional holdings of Shōen's print work and a key document of high-end late-Meiji Tokyo color printing.