Princess Fujitsubo in Court Costume with a Fan

Princess Fujitsubo in Court Costume with a Fan, by Yashima Gakutei, is held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art and depicts one of the great female characters of the Genji monogatari, Lady Fujitsubo, the empress-consort whose love for Hikaru Genji and her own subsequent renunciation gave the eleventh-century novel one of its most haunting narrative arcs. Genji-themed prints were a perennial subject in Japanese visual culture, supplying designers across schools with a vast repertoire of female characters, courtly settings, and seasonal allusions. Yashima Gakutei, trained in the Hokusai school under Katsushika Hokusai, made literary heroines a recurring subject in his surimono, the privately commissioned deluxe print format that he and Totoya Hokkei dominated in the 1820s and 1830s. Fujitsubo, depicted here in formal court costume (junihitoe) with a folding fan, embodies the layered silk robes of Heian-period court dress that surimono printing was uniquely equipped to render in lavish detail. Surimono printing techniques, including embossed pattern in the multiple kimono layers, metallic pigments on the fan and accouterments, and bokashi gradations across the background, would have lent the design the technical luxury characteristic of the format. The Hokusai school's discipline of figural composition organizes the heavy mass of the court robes, the tilt of the head, and the placement of inscribed kyoka verses. The accompanying verses, integral to surimono, would have linked the Genji subject to a contemporary occasion. The Metropolitan Museum's holdings of Gakutei's Genji-themed surimono provide a critical resource for studying how the Hokusai school engaged the canonical Heian novel within the privately distributed deluxe print tradition.