(untitled)

This untitled print by Takehisa Yumeji, preserved in the British Museum and catalogued on ukiyo-e.org, distills the artist's central preoccupations into a single quiet image of a modern Japanese bijin. The figure exhibits the long oval face, narrow shoulders, and downcast eyes that became hallmarks of the yumeji-shiki beauty, a type so closely identified with Yumeji that contemporary writers used his name as shorthand for an entire emotional register of Taisho roman, the literary-romantic culture of 1910s and early 1920s Japan. Without a published title, the print rewards close attention to its small details: the careful curve of a sleeve, the suggestion of a hair ornament, the soft transition between flesh tones and the surrounding ground. These are the elements Yumeji used to imply rather than describe a story, drawing on his experience as a magazine illustrator and book designer to construct images that read as much like poems as portraits. The British Museum holds a strong selection of Yumeji's woodblock work, and many of his sheets entered Western collections in the 1920s and 1930s through dealers like Yamanaka and through travelers who responded to the way his modern Japanese bijin combined the materials of traditional ukiyo-e with the sensibility of European Art Nouveau and Symbolism. For collectors building a Taisho roman shelf, this anonymous, undated example offers a particularly pure encounter with Yumeji's graphic style, free of the narrative framing of his series prints.