Thirty-two Aspects of Women (Fuzoku sanjuniso)
Fuzoku sanjuniso
About This Series
"Thirty-Two Aspects of Customs and Manners" (Fuzoku sanjuniso), often translated as "Thirty-Two Aspects of Women" or "Thirty-Two Aspects of Daily Life," is one of Tsukioka Yoshitoshi's most celebrated bijin-ga cycles and a landmark of late Meiji print design. The series was published by Tsunashima Kamekichi in 1888 and comprises thirty-two oban tate-e sheets, each depicting a woman of a different social class and historical period in an attitude suggested by a brief Japanese descriptor printed in a small cartouche at the upper right: "looking heavy" (omotaso), "looking warm" (atatakaso), "looking entertained" (omoshiroso), and so on. The figures range from courtesans of the Kansei and Bunsei eras to mothers, geisha, country wives and contemporary Meiji women of the 1880s, providing a panoramic survey of the kinds of female character types that had peopled Japanese print culture across roughly a century. The series is one of Yoshitoshi's most consistently admired works because of the psychological precision of the portraits, the integration of period-specific costume detail, and the controlled, almost monochromatic palette in which red, indigo and grey are used with great restraint against the unprinted ground of the paper. Stevenson and other Yoshitoshi cataloguers single out the Fuzoku sanjuniso as a key work of the artist's late bijin-ga production, alongside the "Twenty-Four Hours" series, and complete sets are held in the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, the British Museum, the Edo-Tokyo Museum and the Tokyo National Museum, with individual sheets common in major Western collections. The series sits at the very end of the ukiyo-e bijin-ga tradition and is widely regarded as one of its most accomplished late statements before the genre gave way to the shin hanga revival of the early twentieth century.
Prints in This Series (4)
Frequently Asked Questions
"Thirty-Two Aspects of Customs and Manners" (Fuzoku sanjuniso), often translated as "Thirty-Two Aspects of Women" or "Thirty-Two Aspects of Daily Life," is one of Tsukioka Yoshitoshi's most celebrated bijin-ga cycles and a landmark of late Meiji print design. The series was published by Tsunashima Kamekichi in 1888 and comprises thirty-two oban tate-e sheets, each depicting a woman of a different social class and historical period in an attitude suggested by a brief Japanese descriptor printed in a small cartouche at the upper right: "looking heavy" (omotaso), "looking warm" (atatakaso), "looking entertained" (omoshiroso), and so on. The figures range from courtesans of the Kansei and Bunsei eras to mothers, geisha, country wives and contemporary Meiji women of the 1880s, providing a panoramic survey of the kinds of female character types that had peopled Japanese print culture across roughly a century. The series is one of Yoshitoshi's most consistently admired works because of the psychological precision of the portraits, the integration of period-specific costume detail, and the controlled, almost monochromatic palette in which red, indigo and grey are used with great restraint against the unprinted ground of the paper. Stevenson and other Yoshitoshi cataloguers single out the Fuzoku sanjuniso as a key work of the artist's late bijin-ga production, alongside the "Twenty-Four Hours" series, and complete sets are held in the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, the British Museum, the Edo-Tokyo Museum and the Tokyo National Museum, with individual sheets common in major Western collections. The series sits at the very end of the ukiyo-e bijin-ga tradition and is widely regarded as one of its most accomplished late statements before the genre gave way to the shin hanga revival of the early twentieth century.
The Thirty-two Aspects of Women (Fuzoku sanjuniso) series contains 4 prints, created by Tsukioka Yoshitoshi.
The Thirty-two Aspects of Women (Fuzoku sanjuniso) series was created by Tsukioka Yoshitoshi (月岡芳年).
We currently have 4 of 4 known prints from the Thirty-two Aspects of Women (Fuzoku sanjuniso) series indexed in our collection. Browse them all on this page.
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