Beauty on a Veranda in Snow

Beauty on a Veranda in Snow is a hanging scroll in ink and color on silk dated by the Metropolitan Museum (accession 2020.393.2) to around 1794-95, when Sakai Hōitsu was in his early thirties and still painting in the ukiyo-e bijinga idiom that preceded his Rinpa turn. Before his 1797 Buddhist ordination, Hōitsu was a serious student of contemporary ukiyo-e portraiture, working closely with the Utagawa and Katsukawa circles, and his earliest surviving signed paintings are hanging scrolls of beautiful women in a manner clearly indebted to Kitagawa Utamaro and his peers. This scroll shows that early manner at its accomplished best: a solitary courtesan or town beauty stands on an exterior veranda as snow falls, her elongated figure rendered with the tall, slender proportions of late-1790s Edo bijinga, her kimono picked out in fine pigment against the silk ground. The Metropolitan dates the painting to 1794-1795, placing it squarely in the brief window between Hōitsu's debut as a daimyō-amateur painter and his withdrawal from secular life. The scroll documents the breadth of his pre-Rinpa training and the surprising stylistic distance he would travel in the following decade.