2

Plate 2 from Yamamoto Shoun's serial album Women in Their Pursuits follows directly on the heels of the opening sheet, broadening the artist's portrait gallery of Meiji-era women going about their daily lives. Shoun, born in 1870 in Kochi prefecture and trained in both Kano and Maruyama-Shijo painting before transferring his skills to woodblock design, brought a soft, brush-painterly sensibility to a genre that often relied on bolder graphic shorthand. His outlines are confident but elastic, his color massing restrained, and his compositions show an unusual willingness to leave the page nearly empty so that a single figure's gesture or posture can be read clearly. Within the wider context of Meiji [bijin-ga](/glossary/bijin-ga), Shoun stood out for replacing the courtesan and stage beauty of the Edo tradition with women drawn from contemporary middle-class life, an editorial choice he would carry into his celebrated companion album Ima Sugata (Modern Figures). The print is documented in the Japanese Art Open Database indexed by [ukiyo-e](/glossary/ukiyo-e).org, which has digitized the Women in Their Pursuits album as a complete sequence for easier comparison. As the second image in that sequence, the sheet helps to define the album's emotional range, suggesting that no single moment in a woman's day was beneath Shoun's notice. It is a deliberately quiet image, but in that quietness it preserves a great deal: an attitude, a costume, a way of holding the body, and the tacit acknowledgment that Meiji women's labor and self-possession deserved the same careful documentary attention that earlier ukiyo-e artists had given to their celebrated beauties.