Yamato jinbutsu gafu (People of Yamato Picture Album) — Travelling Women

Travelling Women is a representative plate from the second series of Yamaguchi Soken's Yamato jinbutsu gafu (倭人物画譜 後編), published in Kyoto in Bunka 1 (1804) and held by the British Museum. The composition depicts a small group of women on the road, drawn with the descriptive Maruyama-school line that Soken had absorbed under Ōkyo and refined through his association with Matsumura Goshun's Shijō workshop. Travel was a major theme in late Edo Kyoto and Osaka culture — pilgrimages to Ise, Shikoku, and Kyoto's own temples and shrines drew steady streams of travelers along the great highways, and women on the road were a recognized type within the broader iconography of contemporary Japan that Soken set out to survey in the Yamato jinbutsu gafu. The plate uses the album's standard black-and-white woodblock printing on paper, with carving that follows Soken's brush so faithfully that the line preserves the rhythm of the original drawing. As one of the most often-reproduced plates from the second series, Travelling Women has been widely cited as evidence of Soken's compositional intelligence and of his place in the Maruyama-Shijō tradition of figure painting.