On the Road, A Lady of the Genkō Era (1313-34), from the series Thirty-Six Elegant Selections
- Date:
- 1894
- Medium:
- Woodblock print, ink and color on paper
- Source:
- Cleveland Museum of Art
On the Road, A Lady of the Genko Era (1313–1334), from the series Thirty-Six Elegant Selections is a 1894 print by Mizuno Toshikata held by the Cleveland Museum of Art (accession 2017.71). It is a companion design within the same Sanjuroko kasen cycle as the museum's A Puppet Made from a Bucket and demonstrates the project's organizing logic: each print attaches a representative woman to a specific historical era, in this case the Genko era of the early fourteenth century, which preceded the Kemmu Restoration of Emperor Go-Daigo. As a Yoshitoshi student, Toshikata had inherited a method of historical bijinga in which costume becomes a primary vehicle of period evidence, and this print exemplifies the approach. The Genko-era figure is on the road, a setup that allows the designer to give the composition a strong vertical movement and to integrate landscape and architectural elements that root the figure in her century. The series as a whole, published in the mid-1890s, was one of the most coherent bijinga cycles of the late Meiji period, and Cleveland's pair of impressions allows researchers to study Toshikata's range across two different eras within the same project. While he was simultaneously producing senso-e prints of the Sino-Japanese War in 1894, the Thirty-Six Elegant Selections demonstrates that his artistic ambition remained anchored in the historical-female tradition he had inherited from Yoshitoshi.
On the Road, A Lady of the Genkō Era (1313-34), from the series Thirty-Six Elegant Selections was created by Mizuno Toshikata (水野年方) in 1894.
