Listening to a Cuckoo under a Weeping Willow on the Riverbank

Listening to a Cuckoo under a Weeping Willow on the Riverbank is a quiet, almost lyrical Kitao Masanobu sheet held by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, that operates well outside the artist's much more famous Yoshiwara album and inside the late-eighteenth-century Edo bijin-ga tradition of seasonal poetic image. The cuckoo (hototogisu) was already one of the most loaded birds in classical Japanese verse — its first cry signaling the arrival of early summer — and Masanobu uses the riverbank weeping willow, its long tassels brushing the water, to anchor the scene to a precise hour and season. The figure, almost certainly a woman in light summer kimono, leans against the willow trunk and looks slightly upward in the conventional listening pose of the genre. Masanobu — who under his other name, Santō Kyōden, was as well-known as a writer of comic fiction — draws her in the calm oval-faced bijin manner of his more famous courtesan portraits, but the setting is the open riverbank rather than the Yoshiwara, and the surrounding paper does almost as much expressive work as the figure. The impression's restrained palette of pale willow green, soft pink, and muted gray is characteristic of the late-Tenmei moment, and the print is a fine example of Masanobu at his most poetic.