Karuta (Playing Cards)

Shima Seien grew up in a family of artists in Osaka, learning how to paint from her father and elder brother. Her painting of two maiko (apprentice geisha) in Osaka’s entertainment district received an award at the 1912 Bunten exhibition, making twenty-year old Seien an overnight sensation in the Osaka painting circle. Her continued success in the bijinga (paintings of beautiful women) genre at various exhibitions propelled young Seien to earn a status on par with two highly respected women artists of her time, Uemura Shōen in Kyoto and Ikeda Shōen in Tokyo. In reference to the second character of their artist’s name, en (“garden”), they were popularly known as “San en” the (Three ens).

Karuta is a work by Seien from the period when she was solidifying her reputation as a talented woman artist. The intimate-scale painting reflects Seien’s illustration style, displaying a fresh sketch-like quality with immediacy of execution, which is often absent in large-scale exhibition pieces. The term karuta derives from a Portuguese word carta meaning “card” and here refers to Western playing cards, which were introduced to Japan by the Portuguese in the sixteenth century. Various types of card games were popular in Japan, including the “poem cards” of native origin, which featured 100 waka poems by 100 poets. After the opening of the Meiji period, however, the Western-style playing card also gained popularity. The motif began to appear in nihonga during the Taishō period when the artists explored novel subject matter to invigorate their painting traditions.

Seien’s works were periodically included in Buntin, Teiten and Takashimaya Department Store, Osaka exhibits and are in the collection of the Osaka Municipal Museum of Fine Arts, and others, as well as in many private collections in Japan.

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