Lady Tamamushi raising a fan target

Dated circa 1681 to 1698 and held in the Art Institute of Chicago, Lady Tamamushi Raising a Fan Target is a vertical o-[oban](/glossary/oban) tan-e hand-colored woodblock print attributed to Sugimura Jihei, depicting a scene from the legendary biography of Lady Tamamushi (also Tamamushi-no-Mae), a celebrated Heian-era beauty associated with archery contests at the imperial court. The episode of the lady raising a fan as an archery target is a recurring motif in yamato-e and later [ukiyo-e](/glossary/ukiyo-e) narrative imagery, drawn from the broader cultural memory of the Heian aristocracy's refined entertainments. Sugimura's composition isolates the figure at substantial scale on the large vertical o-oban sheet, with her elaborate court robes and the symbolic fan target framing her as both a beauty and a literary heroine. Printed in single-block black ink and hand-colored with tan, the orange-red lead pigment that defines the tan-e mode, the work represents Sugimura's engagement with classical female literary iconography of a kind that paralleled Moronobu's contemporaneous bijin-e zukushi project. The attributed status of the print reflects the standard scholarly caution about unsigned Genroku-era works whose stylistic features point to a particular hand but lack the inscription that would secure attribution beyond doubt. The work was acquired through the Clarence Buckingham Collection and exemplifies the early Western collecting interest that built the foundation of Sugimura scholarship.