Woman by a Plum Tree Matched with the Wisteria Maiden (from a series of women compared to figures from Otsu paintings)

A circa early-1830s print in the Cleveland Museum of Art's collection, this design depicts a woman beside a plum tree paired in a mitate with the Wisteria Maiden (Fuji Musume) — a kabuki and folk character who appears as a young woman in fuji-blossom-patterned kimono and who became, through the famous Otsu-e tradition and the buyō dance variants, one of the most recognizable theatrical character-types of the nineteenth century. The mitate construction here matches the contemporary plum-tree beauty with the classical wisteria-maiden character, the two flowers (plum and wisteria, early-spring and late-spring) and the two figures (real and theatrical) functioning as parallel doubled subjects in the manner that surimono and mitate-e routinely exploited. The early-1830s date places the print in the final years of Shigenobu's life, and the Cleveland catalogue records it under that broad date band. The handling is consistent with the late surimono manner: small in scale, dense in pattern, refined in line, with the elongated facial type that Shigenobu carried forward from his earlier work.