Maiko

Originally from Kanazawa and trained as an engraver for newspaper printing, Kitano Tsunetomi moved to Osaka and studied with Ineno Toshitsune. After working as a successful newspaper illustrator, he began pursuing a career in painting. He first garnered recognition at the Bunten government exhibitions during the early 1910s for his highly sensual paintings of geisha and courtesans. The sense of realism Tsunetomi achieved in these works is thought to reflect his earlier study of Western-style oil painting. In 1917, Tsunetomi became a member of the Japan Art Institute (Nihon Bijutsuin) and thereafter his painting style began to change toward an increasingly introspective, idealized expression. One of the earliest nihonga artists from Osaka to attain national fame, Tsunetomi energized the Osaka painting circle and nurtured many local artists, including Nakamura Teii and Shima Seien. 

A maiko is an apprentice geisha and a popular subject of modern bijinga (painting of beautiful women). Tsunetomi spent a good deal of time in the pleasure quarters of Kyoto and Osaka, and painted numerous images of women entertainers throughout his career. This hanging scroll portrays a maiko in a relaxed pose and points to his 1912 painting titled Yokugo (After a Bath), an unusually realistic representation of a young woman seated on a veranda in a similar pose. Maiko also relates to his 1915 Bunten exhibition entry titled Atataka (Feeling Warm). The Bunten painting depicted a young geisha in a bright red under-kimono seated casually in her private space. Tsunetomi created its companion piece, Kagami no mae (In front of a Mirror)—an image of a standing woman dressed in black under-kimono and red obi sash—and showed it at the Japan Art Institute exhibition of the same year. Provocative depictions of young women with lively human qualities, all these works firmly established Tsunetomi’s name as a painter of a new type of bijin. In Maiko, Tsunetomi achieves a feeling of corporeal body of the figure underneath her garment and uses a sketchy line to depict the folds of kimono, indicating his grasp of the realistic techniques of Western painting. The striking juxtaposition of black and red seen here also appears in many of his Taishō-period works. A customary nihonga practice, Tsunetomi often repeated the same basic composition for multiple works. A virtually identical work is in the collection of Nara Prefectural Museum of Art. [Hashizume Setsuya, Kitano Tsunetomi ten (2003), pl. 27] 

Tsunetomi’s works are in the collection of Kyoto Municipal Museum of Art, Osaka City Museum of Fine Arts, The Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, Yamagata Art Museum, and Kinoshita Museum, among others.

Click on any image for an enlarged view.