Untitled design for a fan print (Women with Poem Slips...)

A design intended for an uchiwa-e (団扇絵), a woodblock print mounted as the face of a rigid summer fan rather than sold as a flat sheet. The asymmetric, roughly semicircular field forces a different compositional logic from [oban](/glossary/oban)-format [bijin-ga](/glossary/bijin-ga): figures must be arranged so the design reads coherently when held at a tilt and when the lower edge is gripped by a handle. Here Gekko depicts women with [tanzaku](/glossary/tanzaku) — the narrow paper slips on which seasonal poems are inscribed and tied to bamboo — a motif most strongly associated with the Tanabata festival of the seventh month. The genre allowed a relatively informal handling of figure and ground, and Gekko's design positions the women at varying distances from the picture plane to animate the curved field. Fan prints were produced as ephemera; surviving impressions, particularly unmounted designs as preserved here, are an important record of his work in formats outside the standard sheet print.