Volume 10 - Masterpiece Selection 2

Volume 10 - Masterpiece Selection 2 is a Shima Seien bijin-ga issued as part of the multi-volume publication Complete Works of Modern Japanese Bijin (Gendai Nihon bijin gashu), a Taisho-Showa woodblock anthology that gathered figure prints by many leading early-twentieth-century artists working in the bijin-ga genre. Series like this one were a distinctive feature of the period: rather than commissioning the most celebrated shin-hanga publishers' large-format luxury portraits, anthology editors curated cross-sections of contemporary work in modest sheet sizes, often binding the prints into deluxe portfolios for collectors interested in mapping the breadth of the modern bijin-ga revival. Shima Seien's inclusion in such a programme positions her alongside her better-known male contemporaries (figures such as Ito Shinsui, Yamakawa Shuho, and Torii Kotondo) as a representative practitioner of the genre, and underscores the continued vitality of bijin-ga at a moment when photography, lithography, and Western-style oil painting were aggressively competing for elite visual attention in Japan. The present sheet appears as the second masterpiece selection within Volume 10 of the series. The impression is catalogued in the Ohmi Gallery reference set on ukiyo-e.org (record Various_artists-Complete_Works_of_Modern_Japanese_Bijin-10-Volume_10_-_Masterpiece_Selection_2-05-01-2010-10279-x2000), where Seien is identified as the contributing artist for this plate within the anthology; the specific subject, exact date, publisher, carver, and printer of this Seien plate are not stated in the cited source and are not invented here, but the print is firmly attributable as a Shima Seien bijin-ga produced for the Modern Japanese Bijin series.