Tatsuta-hime (Princess Tatsuta) / Takehisa Yumeji moku-hanga shu 竹下夢二木版画集 (A Collection of Takehisa Yumeji's Pictures in Woodblock Print)

Tatsuta-hime, Princess Tatsuta, comes from the Takehisa Yumeji moku-hanga shu, the Collection of Takehisa Yumeji's Pictures in Woodblock Print, a portfolio that gathered some of his most ambitious designs for serious print collectors and is now represented in the British Museum and on ukiyo-e.org. Tatsuta-hime is the kami of autumn and of the changing leaves at Mount Tatsuta, an iconic site celebrated since the Heian period for its brilliant maples and as a backdrop for waka poetry about impermanence. Yumeji recasts this mythic figure as one of his signature modern Japanese bijin, fusing classical divinity with the slender silhouette and faintly wistful expression of the yumeji-shiki face. The decorative program is unmistakably Taisho roman: stylized maple leaves, asymmetric placement, a graphic balance between bold pattern and empty space, and a palette that flirts with autumnal warmth without slipping into the saturated color of nineteenth-century ukiyo-e. By including a goddess in a portfolio that otherwise focuses on modern subjects, Yumeji situates his contemporary beauties within a longer Japanese tradition of female icons, suggesting that the fashionable young women of Tokyo carry within them something of the same poetic charge as Heian deities. The moku-hanga shu portfolio was one of the most carefully produced of Yumeji's woodblock projects, and prints from it are now anchor pieces for collectors who want a fully realized statement of his late style and of his ambition to lift modern illustration onto the level of fine-art printmaking.