Print 01 from the series Streaked Mist (Yae gasumi)

Print 01 from the series Streaked Mist (Yae gasumi 八重霞), dated 1906 and held by the Honolulu Museum of Art (Richard Lane Collection), is the opening plate of Ikeda Shōen's twelve-print color woodblock album published by the Tokyo publisher Kokkeidō (Akiyama Buemon). Like the other sheets in the cycle, it presents a single Taishō-era woman in seasonal costume, set against minimal background and rendered with the soft graded color washes and brush-trained line that Shōen had absorbed from her teacher Mizuno Toshikata (1866-1908). The album as a whole pushes the technical resources of late-Meiji Tokyo color printing — multiple block registrations, lacquer-printed ink, silver mica decoration on hair ornaments — into the service of a refined nihonga bijin-ga sensibility distinct from the busier polychromy of mid-nineteenth-century nishiki-e. The print format is oban yoko-e (horizontal large-sheet), about 9 5/8 by 14 5/8 inches (24.6 by 37.2 centimeters). The Streaked Mist series belongs to Shōen's most important commercial print project before her death in 1917 and circulated widely among Tokyo collectors in the years she was simultaneously establishing herself at the Bunten exhibitions as a serious nihonga painter. The Honolulu Museum of Art's full set, acquired with the Richard Lane Collection, is among the most important American holdings of late-Meiji and Taishō bijin-ga prints.