Spring

Spring is a hanging-scroll painting of about 1911 by Ikeda Terukata, executed in ink, colors, and gold on silk and held by the Art Institute of Chicago (Kate S. Buckingham Endowment). The scroll was conceived as the companion to Ikeda Shōen's Autumn of the same date — the two works passed together to the Art Institute and form one of the most important documented examples of the Ikedas' collaborative practice as a husband-and-wife nihonga partnership. Terukata's Spring presents a single elegantly dressed Taishō woman in seasonal costume against the restrained ground that the Tokyo [bijin-ga](/glossary/bijin-ga) circle around Mizuno Toshikata (1866-1908) preferred to the busier backgrounds of nineteenth-century [ukiyo-e](/glossary/ukiyo-e) prints. The painting belongs to the early years of Terukata's mature exhibition career, after his training under Toshikata and his marriage to Shōen, and at the moment he was becoming a regular at the Bunten salons established in 1907. The combination of fine line work in the figure's outlines, soft graded color washes for the kimono fabric, and the discreet use of gold for fixtures and decoration places it firmly in the late-Meiji and Taishō tradition of nihonga bijin-ga — admissible to the formal hanging-scroll format that nihonga painters defended against the rising influence of Western oil painting, yet faithful to the older bijin-ga preoccupation with seasonal costume and the calibrated representation of feminine grace. As one half of a documented Ikeda paired set, Spring is a key reference point for the Tokyo bijin-ga school in the years before Shōen's early death in 1917 and Terukata's in 1921.