A Puppet Made from a Bucket, A Lady of the Enpō Era (1673–1681), from the series Thirty-six Elegant Selections

A Puppet Made from a Bucket, A Lady of the Enpo Era (1673–1681), from the series Thirty-six Elegant Selections is a 1894 print by Mizuno Toshikata held by the Cleveland Museum of Art (accession 2017.75). The series Sanjuroku kasen, or Thirty-six Elegant Selections, was Toshikata's major bijinga project of the 1890s; it paired thirty-six historical women, each tied to a specific era of Japanese history, with a small narrative detail that lent the image biographical specificity. The Enpo era (1673–1681), early in the Genroku century's lead-up, was associated with the urban flowering of Edo culture, and the title's reference to a bucket repurposed as a puppet draws on a literary anecdote about that period's domestic improvisation. As a Yoshitoshi student, Toshikata had been schooled in his teacher's method of giving women's portraits a strong historical scaffolding, and the Thirty-six Elegant Selections series is the most thoroughgoing expression of that lesson in his own catalogue. Each print combines a careful study of period costume — here, the kosode and obi appropriate to a seventeenth-century townswoman — with the kind of small narrative gesture that lifts the image above generic beauty. The Cleveland Museum's record dates this impression to 1894, consistent with the documented publication run of the series in the mid-1890s. Among Meiji prints, the series is one of the most coherent and best-preserved cycles of historical bijinga, and Toshikata's reputation as a serious figure designer rests heavily on its strength.