Two Girls in the snow

A winter scene of two girls outdoors during snowfall, almost certainly shown with oilpaper umbrellas (janome-gasa) and padded winter kimono. Snow subjects in late Meiji woodblock prints rely on the unprinted ground of the washi paper to read as snow, with karazuri (blind embossing) sometimes used to suggest accumulated drifts. Falling flakes are conventionally rendered as small white reserves against a graded grey sky printed in bokashi. The Children tag situates this print within Shuntei's kodomo-e output rather than the urban meisho-e of his Tokyo Meisho Zue series, though both share the documentary sensibility toward dress and daily life characteristic of his work. Seasonal pairings — summer evenings, snow, boating, embroidery — were a common organizing principle for albums of this kind, and the present sheet appears to belong to such a sequence.