A Beauty (c. 1810): Art, History and Details

A Beauty (c. 1810) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Fujimaro (Japanese, d. 1830).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

Many ukiyo-e paintings and prints focus on bijin (美人), or “beautiful people.” Female courtesans and entertainers were the main draw in the pleasure district of Edo (now Tokyo), but young men were also available. The poem here reads as follows: "The full blooming cherry / is not the only flower worth mentioning. / The color of the young plum tree / blooms as well." The full blooming cherry is a metaphor for mature women, and the plum for young men.

Object facts

• Title: A Beauty
• Date: c. 1810
• Creator attribution: Fujimaro (Japanese, d. 1830)
• Culture: Japan, Edo period (1615–1868)
• Type: Painting
• Technique: hanging scroll; ink and color on silk
• Dimensions: Overall: 180.4 x 48.3 cm (71 x 19 in.); Painting only: 94 x 31 cm (37 x 12 3/16 in.)
• Collection: ASIAN - Hanging scroll
• Department: Japanese Art
• Accession number: 1985.256

A detail from the museum

The handsome youth in the painting is accompanied by a boy carrying a plum branch.

Collection credit

The Kelvin Smith Collection, given by Mrs. Kelvin Smith

Further reading listed by the museum

• Jenkins, Donald. “Paintings of the Floating World.” The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art, vol. 75, no. 7 (September 1988): 244–260, 262–278, 238.
• “Checklist of the Kelvin Smith Bequest.” The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 75, no. 7 (September 1988): 292–295.
• Jenkins, Donald, and Lynn Jacobsen-Katsumoto. The Floating World Revisited. Portland, OR: Portland Art Museum, 1993.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.