Hanging Poem Cards (tanzaku) from a Maple Tree

Hanging Poem Cards (tanzaku) from a Maple Tree, dated about 1903-1905 and held by the Honolulu Museum of Art (accession 26006), is a color woodblock kuchi-e (frontispiece) by Ikeda Terukata produced for one of the late-Meiji literary magazines distributed nationally by Tokyo publishers. The composition depicts a woman beside a maple tree from whose branches hang tanzaku — the narrow paper strips on which classical waka poems were inscribed and tied to seasonal trees, a custom rooted in the Heian-period practice of leaving poems for absent lovers or for the gods. Terukata's handling combines the precise figure drawing he absorbed from his teacher Mizuno Toshikata (1866-1908) with the richly graded color and lacquer-printed ink (urushi-zuri) characteristic of high-end late-Meiji color woodblock printing. The kuchi-e form — multi-block color frontispieces folded into the openings of novels and short-story magazines such as Bungei kurabu — gave painter-illustrators of Terukata's generation a parallel commercial outlet that reached audiences far larger than the Bunten salon could, and his contributions are now recognized alongside those of Kaburagi Kiyokata and Tomioka Eisen as defining the kuchi-e at its peak. The Honolulu Museum of Art preserves a significant group of Terukata's frontispieces alongside his wife Ikeda Shōen's; together they form one of the most important American institutional records of the Tokyo Toshikata circle's commercial print practice.