Preparing Tea at Miyako Odori Festival

The Miyako Odori, the spring dance performances staged annually since 1872 by the geiko and maiko of Kyoto's Gion Kōbu district, opens with a brief tea service in the theater's tearoom, where a senior maiko prepares thin matcha while the audience watches before the dances begin. Suizan's image, almost certainly a bijin-ga, depicts a young woman in seasonal kimono performing this preliminary tea preparation. Compositional qualities typical of his Kyoto-school training would emphasize the slender vertical of the figure, the subtle spatial geometry of tatami and tea utensils, and a restrained palette built around soft pinks and indigos rather than the saturated reds favored by some Tokyo bijin-ga designers. The print's Kyoto subject and Kyoto sensibility distinguish it from contemporary Watanabe-published bijin-ga: Suizan, a student of Takeuchi Seihō, brought nihonga training to mokuhanga and was one of the few shin-hanga designers actively documenting the festival culture of his home city. Multiple states or variants of this design circulate, suggesting a popular subject within his oeuvre.