11

Plate 11 of Yamamoto Shoun's Women in Their Pursuits offers another patiently observed vignette from the artist's long-running survey of Meiji feminine life. As with the rest of the album, the design centers on a single woman, framed against a near-empty ground that allows her clothing, posture, and activity to carry the full weight of the image. Shoun, born in Kochi in 1870, was trained in Kano and Maruyama-Shijo painting before he turned to woodblock design, and the influence of those classical schools is unmistakable in the supple ink lines and the painterly use of muted color. He arrived at woodblock printing in the 1890s and quickly distinguished himself within the broader Meiji [bijin-ga](/glossary/bijin-ga) tradition by treating the ordinary women of modern Japan, not the courtesans of Edo, as worthy subjects for serial portraiture. The Women in Their Pursuits set is one of two great album projects in his oeuvre, the other being Ima Sugata (Modern Figures), and the two complement each other: the latter focuses more on outward appearance, the former on what the women in question are actually doing. The print is preserved in the Japanese Art Open Database indexed by [ukiyo-e](/glossary/ukiyo-e).org, where the entire series has been catalogued in order. Plate 11 thus contributes to a larger documentary project, and the cumulative effect of the album is sociological as well as aesthetic. It registers what daily life looked like for the artist's contemporaries, and it does so with the same affectionate eye that Shoun brought to all his Meiji bijin-ga, balancing nostalgia for older painterly traditions with a clear-eyed engagement with the people of his own modernizing world.