Court lady standing amidst pines

Court lady standing amidst pines, dated around 1823 and now in the Art Institute of Chicago, is a shikishiban surimono showing a kuge—an aristocratic court lady—in formal Heian-style dress, posed beside a stand of mature pine trees. The pine was a long-established emblem of longevity and good fortune in Japanese visual culture, and pairing it with a court figure invokes the classical past that surimono themes often referenced. Taito II's drawing follows Hokusai-school conventions: the figure stands with a slight forward lean, her trailing robes (juni-hitoe) rendered as overlapping bands of color, and the pine boughs cropped at the upper edge to frame her without compressing the composition. The print would originally have carried one or more kyoka verses on the same sheet, since surimono almost always paired image and poem; even where the poem cartouche has been trimmed in later mounting, the relationship between figure and poetic theme remains legible. Court-lady imagery appears regularly in Taito II's surimono output, reflecting kyoka poets' frequent interest in classical subjects.