The Sixth Month (Bijin Juni Sugata)

The Sixth Month (Bijin Juni Sugata) belongs to Migita Toshihide's twelve-sheet series Bijin juni sugata (Twelve Aspects of Beautiful Women), in which the artist mapped the lunar calendar onto a sequence of fashionable female figures. The Sixth Month, Minazuki, falls at the height of summer and called from designers a vocabulary of cooling motifs: thin gauze kimono, fans, water imagery, and the seasonal patterns appropriate to early hot weather. This impression is held by the Rijksmuseum and reproduced on Wikimedia Commons (commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:De_zesde_maand-Rijksmuseum_RP-P-1990-154.jpeg). As a pupil of Tsukioka Yoshitoshi, Toshihide had absorbed his teacher's careful figural drawing and brought it directly into the Meiji bijinga market, where his work sat comfortably alongside parallel calendar series by Yoshu Chikanobu and others. The format is vertical and relatively spare, with the woman foregrounded against an unfussy ground so that kimono pattern, obi knot and hair ornament can do the seasonal work. Within Toshihide's wider output, dominated as it was by senso-e from the Sino-Japanese and Russo-Japanese wars, the Bijin juni sugata series exemplifies the steady commercial bijinga production that working Meiji designers needed to maintain for publishers. The Rijksmuseum's holdings allow the series to be reconstructed sheet by sheet in cross-institutional study, and Sixth Month stands within that run as the high-summer counterpart to the more elaborate autumn and winter designs at the other end of the calendar. Late-Meiji bijinga of this kind also bear documentary weight, recording the kimono textiles, hairstyles and accessories of the 1890s Tokyo fashionable class, and Toshihide's careful drawing in the Bijin juni sugata sheets makes the series a useful visual record of women's costume in the decade between the Sino-Japanese and Russo-Japanese Wars.