Portrait of a Woman

A nineteenth-century framed painting in ink and color on silk attributed to Tsukioka Sessai, depicting a single female figure in a half-length portrait composition. The Metropolitan Museum of Art preserves the work within its H. O. Havemeyer Collection, bequeathed by Mrs. H. O. Havemeyer in 1929 as part of one of the most important early American gifts of Japanese painting to a public museum. The Met catalogs the attribution as both to Sessai and to the style of Giuseppe Castiglione (Lang Shining, 1688-1766), the Italian Jesuit painter who served at the Qing imperial court and whose introduction of European chiaroscuro and three-quarter portrait conventions into Chinese painting was transmitted to Japanese painters through Nagasaki and Kyoto during the eighteenth century. The double attribution signals a work that combined Sessai's kamigata [bijin-ga](/glossary/bijin-ga) tradition with the imported European-style portrait conventions that had begun to filter into Edo and Osaka painting circles through the Akita ranga school and through Maruyama Ōkyo's earlier experiments with Western perspective and modeling. The portrait measures approximately 35 3/4 by 27 inches (90.8 by 68.6 cm) overall. The work belongs to the same broad category of late Edo kamigata painting represented across the Met's Sessai holdings and demonstrates the cross-currents between Japanese [ukiyo-e](/glossary/ukiyo-e) tradition, Kano-school discipline, and the imported European portrait conventions that distinguished the late Edo Osaka painting milieu from the more conservative Edo print circles of the same period.