Young Girl

Young Girl (Junge Mädchen, 少女) is a 1920 painting by Kikuchi Keigetsu, reproduced in the German-language Katalog of contemporary Japanese painting that introduced his work to European audiences in the early Taishō period. The composition is a single full-length figure of a young Japanese woman in kimono, rendered with the restrained colour palette and quiet line that became Keigetsu's signature after his return from Europe in 1923 — although this work predates the trip and shows the qualities already taking shape in his late-1910s figural practice. The handling reflects the Maruyama-Shijō training Keigetsu received from Kikuchi Hōbun, with precise descriptive observation of dress and posture set against an atmospheric, lightly tinted ground. The work is among the canonical examples of Keigetsu's middle-period bijin-ga: figural paintings of women that reject the elaborate decorative manner of late-Meiji ukiyo-e-derived bijin painters in favour of a quieter, more classical idiom oriented toward the Heian and Kamakura ideal of restrained feminine dignity.