Charles Wirgman was a painter who was sent by the Illustrated London News as a reporter to Asia, at a time when the West was expanding its influence there. In 1861, he traveled from Qing (present-day China) to Japan, where he contributed pictures of contemporary events, people’s lives, and landscapes to the London-based newspaper.
In this work, a woman wearing a kimono of thin fabric and Komachi geta (with the front “teeth” angled diagonally) walks with a Japanese umbrella resting on her shoulder. At around this time, Wirgman started a company in Yokohama with Felice Beato, a photographer who had also arrived in Japan around the same time, and they sold photographs of these kinds of paintings depicting Japanese customs.
(KASHIWAGI Tomoh)
Charles Wirgman was a painter who was sent by the Illustrated London News as a reporter to Asia, at a time when the West was expanding its influence there. In 1861, he traveled from Qing (present-day China) to Japan, where he contributed pictures of contemporary events, people’s lives, and landscapes to the London-based newspaper.
In this work, a woman wearing a kimono of thin fabric and Komachi geta (with the front “teeth” angled diagonally) walks with a Japanese umbrella resting on her shoulder. At around this time, Wirgman started a company in Yokohama with Felice Beato, a photographer who had also arrived in Japan around the same time, and they sold photographs of these kinds of paintings depicting Japanese customs.
(KASHIWAGI Tomoh)