Shrine Attendant Raking Maple Leaves

Shrine Attendant Raking Maple Leaves is a Katsushika Hokusai design dated to 1825, a quiet figural composition that contrasts with the artist's better-known panoramas. A young Shinto attendant in pale robes bends over her rake in the precincts of a shrine, gathering a heap of scarlet leaves while the gnarled trunk of a tree rises behind her. Hokusai sets the figure against a largely empty background so that the eye focuses on the curve of the body and the bright disc of color formed by the leaves. As an Edo ukiyo-e print the design demonstrates the artist's command of intimate genre subjects, drawing on the same observational eye that informs his sketchbooks but with carefully chosen pigments and a refined sense of compositional placement. The treatment of the leaves, both swept into a controlled pile and scattered in a few characterful strays, recalls Hokusai's interest in capturing seasonal moments as small acts of human labor. The Cleveland Museum of Art impression preserves the work within its strong holdings of Japanese woodblock prints and gives visitors a chance to see Hokusai working in a quieter register than the seascapes and Fuji views that typically define his place in the history of the ukiyo-e print.