Woman with a Fan by Moonlight

Held by the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam (accession RP-P-1997-90) and dated 1900-1925, this color woodblock print by Tsutsui Toshimine depicts a woman in a green kimono seated on a balcony, holding a folding fan and contemplating the moonlit night beyond a flowering branch. The composition is a textbook example of Toshimine's mature bijin-ga kuchi-e style: a single female figure in a moment of quiet contemplation, set against a spatially compressed but suggestive background, with the color palette dominated by muted greens, indigo blues, and the silver powder (gin-pun) printed effects that distinguished the most ambitious late-Meiji frontispieces from cheaper popular prints. The fan, the moon, and the flowering branch combine into a layered seasonal and emotional reference — late summer or early autumn evening, by convention a moment of reflection and gentle melancholy in classical Japanese poetic vocabulary. The print was acquired by the Rijksmuseum in 1997 through the F. G. Waller Fund, a bequest specifically directed toward Japanese prints, and reflects the museum's late-twentieth-century effort to deepen its Meiji-Taishō kuchi-e holdings beyond the Edo-period ukiyo-e that had dominated nineteenth-century European Japan-collecting. The work has been released by the Rijksmuseum under CC0 and digitized at high resolution.