24

Plate 24 from Yamamoto Shoun's Women in Their Pursuits comes from the album's later sequence, when the cumulative weight of the series has already established its tone and ambitions. Shoun, born in Kochi in 1870 and trained in Kano and Maruyama-Shijo painting before he turned to woodblock design in the early 1890s, used the long-form album to extend the centuries-old [bijin-ga](/glossary/bijin-ga) tradition into the contemporary moment, focusing on the middle-class women of late Meiji Japan rather than the famous beauties of Edo [ukiyo-e](/glossary/ukiyo-e). The sheet's characteristic visual signature, brushed outlines balanced against generous white ground and a muted, harmonious palette, derives from his painterly training and helps to differentiate his work from the bolder graphic shorthand of many of his contemporaries. The Women in Their Pursuits set complements his celebrated parallel album Ima Sugata (Modern Figures), with the present series leaning toward vocation and activity while Ima Sugata concentrated on bearing and dress. The print is preserved in the Japanese Art Open Database indexed by ukiyo-e.org, which has digitized the album as a complete sequence to support comparative study. Plate 24 contributes to that broader documentary project, and to Shoun's larger artistic argument that Meiji women going about ordinary tasks deserved the same patient observation that earlier ukiyo-e artists had given to the courtesans of the pleasure quarters. The result is a quiet sheet that gains depth when read among its siblings, confirming Shoun's stature as one of the most thoughtful chroniclers of Meiji bijin-ga and as a key bridge figure between the late ukiyo-e of the nineteenth century and the shin hanga revival of the twentieth.