Colour print of girl with Western lamp

A figural print pairing a young woman or child with one of the Western lamps that recur throughout Kawakami's work, treated as a curio standing on a table beside her. The composition flattens the figure into outline and color block, with the lamp's glass chimney rendered as a transparent or pale rectangle and its base as a turned silhouette. Such scenes belong to a category Kawakami returned to repeatedly: the Meiji-era domestic interior in which imported objects sat among Japanese furnishings, observed with a mixture of nostalgia and wry distance. The generic titling — color print rather than something more particular — suggests the image was made and exhibited as an example of mokuhanga craft, the colors registered from separately-carved blocks. The mood sits closer to the children depicted on Edo-period karuta or omocha-e (toy prints) than to the [bijin-ga](/glossary/bijin-ga) tradition of refined adult femininity.