Thinking of Hunting

Thinking of Hunting, a color woodblock print of about 1910 held by the Honolulu Museum of Art (accession 27480), is a mature [kuchi-e](/glossary/kuchi-e) (frontispiece) by Ikeda Terukata produced for the literary press at the height of his career. The work belongs to the years between his first Bunten successes and his and Ikeda Shōen's most ambitious collaborative paintings, and its title refers to the falconry and hunting subjects that had been a recurrent motif in Japanese painting since the medieval period — the subject of "thinking of hunting" suggesting either a male hunter in contemplation or, more characteristic of Terukata's [bijin-ga](/glossary/bijin-ga) practice, a woman dressed for or daydreaming about the activity. As a kuchi-e the print would have been folded into the opening pages of a Tokyo literary magazine such as Bungei kurabu, where multi-block color frontispieces served as one of the principal popular outlets for nihonga painters of the Toshikata school. The print's combination of precise figure drawing, restrained palette, and seasonal narrative shows Terukata at the height of his control of the kuchi-e form and is one of his most-reproduced surviving designs. The Honolulu Museum of Art's holdings of Terukata frontispieces, acquired alongside the museum's broader Meiji and Taishō print collection, provide an essential institutional resource for the study of the late-Meiji literary illustration tradition.