Milking Girl

Milking Girl (乳しぼりの娘) is an oil on canvas of 1922-23, now held by the National Museum of Art, Osaka, and one of the works that established Kuniyoshi's reputation for an East-meets-West, fable-like figural Modernism during his first decade in New York. The composition shows a young woman seated on a stool against a heavy, hand-built cow, the two figures arranged in a frieze-like profile with the milkmaid's striped apron and bonnet rendered in flat, decorative patches of paint. The image draws together two of the central iconographic streams of his early work: the cow that he repeatedly used as a personal emblem (he was born in the Year of the Ox in 1889 and felt himself, as he often said, 'guided by the bovine kingdom'), and the female figure in repose that would become his lifelong subject. Milking Girl belongs to the same cluster as Little Joe with the Cow (1923, Crystal Bridges) and Boy with Cow (Wikimedia Commons), and it shows Kuniyoshi already combining the structured drawing he had learned from Kenneth Hayes Miller at the Art Students League with a simplified, slightly archaic space and a sober, mineral palette that critics in the 1920s described as 'Japanese in feeling.' The picture's presence in the National Museum of Art, Osaka, places it among the most accessible Kuniyoshi paintings in his birth country, and it is regularly reproduced in Japanese surveys of twentieth-century yōga (Western-style painting).