Cold Fever

Cold Fever, recorded through the ukiyo-e.org archive, is an unusually direct treatment of illness — a subject relatively rare in commercial ukiyo-e but consistent with the more interior, psychologically attentive bijin-ga of the Meiji period. The figure of a woman shown in the discomfort of fever, perhaps wrapped in bedding or with a damp cloth at her brow, invites comparison with the literary illustrations Tomioka Eisen produced for Meiji novels, where private emotional states were given much more prominence than in classical ukiyo-e. The image reflects the way Meiji bijin-ga, under the influence of contemporary fiction, expanded its emotional vocabulary beyond the public personas of courtesans and actors and into the private life of the home.