Fuzuki 文月 / Bijin juni sugata 美人十二姿

Fuzuki, the seventh lunar month, falls in high summer within Migita Toshihide's series Bijin juni sugata (Twelve Aspects of Beautiful Women), a calendar of fashionable women across the year. The month is associated with Tanabata, the star festival celebrated on its seventh day, and Toshihide takes that seasonal cue as a pretext for the kimono pattern, accessories and hair ornament displayed by his subject. As a Yoshitoshi student, he carried into his bijinga the careful figural precision that his teacher had also brought to the genre, and the resulting Meiji prints sit comfortably alongside late nineteenth-century work by Chikanobu and Yoshu Chikanobu's circle. The British Museum holds an impression of this sheet and supplies the cataloguing data that flows through [ukiyo-e](/glossary/ukiyo-e).org, where the series can be assembled from the institution's open files. The composition is vertical and relatively spare, with the figure foregrounded against an unfussy ground that lets pattern do the seasonal work. Toshihide's reputation rests primarily on senso-e of the Sino-Japanese and Russo-Japanese Wars, but Bijin juni sugata demonstrates the breadth he maintained as a working Meiji designer who needed to provide publishers with the steady commercial subjects that battle prints could not supply year-round. The print belongs to the lineage of late-Edo and Meiji calendar bijinga that mapped the lunar months onto an idealised feminine wardrobe.