Yoshitoshi • I Want to Become Beautiful • Japanese...

Artist: Tsukioka Yoshitoshi (月岡芳年, 1839–1892) — signed Ōju Taiso Yoshitoshi (応需大蘇芳年) Title: Kirei ni Naritai (きれいになりたい) — "I Want to Become Beautiful" Series: Mitate Tai Zukushi (見立多以尽) — Representations of Desires / A Collection of Desires Technique: Woodblock print (nishiki-e) Date: Meiji 11, 1st month (January 1878) Edition: First edition (see note below) Publisher: Inoue Shigehei (井上茂兵衛, also read Inoue Mohei) Text By: Takabatake Ransen (1838–1885), here inscribed Ransen Sanshi sui-dai (藍泉散士醉題) Format: Ōban tate-e, approx. 37 × 25 cm (14½ × 9¾ in.) Signature: Ōju Taiso Yoshitoshi (応需大蘇芳年) with red artist's seal Yoshitoshi 1. Impression and Colors A strong, fresh impression with crisp black keyblock lines and precise registration. The colours are rich and well balanced. 2. Paper & Condition Original Meiji-era impression on washi. The sheet presents well, with light, even toning consistent with the age of the print and perhaps a few minor scattered spots. Please check the images! 3. I Want to Become Beautiful — The Morning Toilette A young woman pauses at her toilette, head tilted and gaze lowered in absorbed concentration. In one hand she cradles a small blue-and-white porcelain bowl; in the other she holds a twist of folded paper — the everyday wrapper for tooth-powder, white face-powder (oshiroi) or rouge. The title supplies her wish: kirei ni naritai — "I want to become beautiful." She is caught mid-routine, in the small private labour of grooming that the series treats with such affectionate, knowing humour. The composition is intimate and quietly graphic. She wears a dark striped kimono with a kasuri (splash-pattern) over-robe in soft browns, a crisp lattice-patterned collar, and red and purple linings, all set against a clean green-and-cream bokashi ground beneath a band of deep blue along the upper edge. As in every sheet of the series, the title turns on the word tai ("I want to…"), and the lengthy accompanying text by Takabatake Ransen plays against the image with characteristic wit — here ranging over bathhouses (the yanagi-yu), soap and lather, and the small vanities of a woman bent on looking her best. This is a first-edition impression, identifiable by two diagnostic features. First, the title cartouche is printed in the three-colour scheme — red, cream, and green with smooth bokashi grading — that distinguishes the first issue from the later edition, in which the cartouches were printed in flat grey. Second, the round publication seal carries the date fully written out, (Meiji 11, 1st month, 1878); in the later edition the numerals were removed from this seal, leaving only the empty framework. 4. Mitate Tai Zukushi — Yoshitoshi's Wry Portraits of Desire The Mitate Tai Zukushi (Representations of Desires, also translated A Collection of Desires) is a set of some twenty bijin-ga published in remarkably rapid succession over barely two months in 1877–78 by Inoue Shigehei. Each sheet shows an unnamed woman in a domestic moment whose pose and surroundings illustrate a particular wish — from "I want to go to sleep" and "I want another drink" to "I want to go abroad." Every title hinges on a play with the word tai, and the accompanying texts — by the popular writer Takabatake Ransen, who signs the present sheet wryly as Ransen Sanshi, "inscribed in his cups" — add a layer of humour and innuendo when read against the image. The series is best understood as an important precursor to Yoshitoshi's celebrated late bijin masterwork, Fūzoku Sanjūnisō (Thirty-Two Aspects of Customs and Manners, 1888), which it anticipates by a full decade. The intimate half-length framing, the close attention to a woman's passing mood, and the wit of the conceit are all already present here, in the middle of the artist's career, before the great supernatural and historical series for which he is best known.

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