The painting shows the artist Nakajima Kiyoshi’s second daughter, Ikuyo, who died at the age of one. Kiyoshi is especially known for the boldly abstract portraits of his later years, but when he was younger he made more traditional works like this one, with beautiful ink lines that he had learned from classical painting. Kiyoshi treasured this painting as a memento of Ikuyo, and later asked his friend Ogawa Yutaka, a framer, to mount it on a contemporary-style hanging scroll in the style known at the time as “modern” mounting. The painting is mounted on plain fabric of a light brown color. The edge of the fusuma sliding door that is depicted on the left of the picture is made to look connected with the fabric, so that as Ikuyo clutches it she appears to step out of the picture. Noticing details like this in the mounts is one of the pleasures of viewing traditional Japanese painting.
(UCHIYAMA Junko)
The painting shows the artist Nakajima Kiyoshi’s second daughter, Ikuyo, who died at the age of one. Kiyoshi is especially known for the boldly abstract portraits of his later years, but when he was younger he made more traditional works like this one, with beautiful ink lines that he had learned from classical painting. Kiyoshi treasured this painting as a memento of Ikuyo, and later asked his friend Ogawa Yutaka, a framer, to mount it on a contemporary-style hanging scroll in the style known at the time as “modern” mounting. The painting is mounted on plain fabric of a light brown color. The edge of the fusuma sliding door that is depicted on the left of the picture is made to look connected with the fabric, so that as Ikuyo clutches it she appears to step out of the picture. Noticing details like this in the mounts is one of the pleasures of viewing traditional Japanese painting.
(UCHIYAMA Junko)