Woman Carrying a Basket of Summer Herbs

Dated to between 1861 and 1867 and held in the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco (accession 1982.1.138.41, Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts), Woman Carrying a Basket of Summer Herbs is a color woodcut by Shiokawa Bunrin that measures approximately 18.1 by 24.8 centimeters and exemplifies his contribution to the mid-nineteenth-century Kyoto woodblock print tradition. The work falls within the period that spanned the final years of the Edo period and the immediate eve of the Meiji Restoration, when Bunrin was at the height of his Kyoto career.

The subject of a woman gathering or carrying summer herbs draws on the classical Japanese pictorial tradition of seasonal female figures, in which beautiful women engaged in characteristic seasonal activities served as both genre subjects and as carriers of the broader seasonal symbolism that ran through classical Japanese poetry and painting. The summer herbs (natsu kusa) carried particular cultural associations with the cooling rituals of summer and with the medicinal and culinary traditions surrounding seasonal plants. Bunrin's translation of the Shijō painter's vocabulary into the printed format here demonstrates the way Kyoto painters of his generation participated in printmaking as a parallel medium to painting.

The work entered the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco through the Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts Endowment Fund, which has been a major source of acquisitions of Japanese prints for the museum since its establishment, and stands as one of the relatively few Bunrin prints in West Coast American collections. Together with the Bunrin surimono at the British Museum, the FAMSF print contributes to the broader picture of Bunrin's engagement with the printed format and his role in transmitting the Shijō school's pictorial vocabulary into the medium of woodblock printing during the final decades of the Edo period and the opening years of Meiji.