Dancing girl

Medium:: Woodblock print
Format:: Oban
Source:: Museum of Applied Arts, Vienna

Typical Price

$1,000–$15,000. Reproductions and common prints: $1,000–$3,000. Key value factors: Yumeji's popular image means many reproductions exist. Original prints are scarcer and more valued.

Description

A dancing girl — young, perhaps a child or a young student of traditional dance — is rendered in Yumeji's characteristic style, the figure's movement suggested rather than anatomically described, the emotion of the dance caught in the angle of the head and the curve of the arms. Children and young women dancers appeared in Yumeji's work as expressions of innocence that existed alongside his more melancholy figures, offering the counter-note of joy and movement to the prevailing mood of his bijin compositions.