Page 114 - Bonhams May 2017 London Fine Japanese Art

183* TP 183

ANONYMOUS 184
Edo period (1615-1868), For details of the charges payable in addition to the final Hammer Price of each Lot
second half of the 17th century please refer to paragraphs 7 & 8 of the Notice to Bidders at the back of the catalogue.
A six-panel chubyobu (medium-size folding
screen), ink, colours, and gold on paper,
depicting a samurai mansion in Kyoto in use
as a house of pleasure: at right three servants,
male and female, bring food and drink to a
large party surrounding a drunken guest,
including both women in elaborately tie-dyed
garments and wakashu (young men) in fancy
robes with long-hilted swords, the remaining
panels featuring a garden with a flowering
cherry-tree in which a monk perches watching
a young girl tying poems to the branches,
one group of three and another group of
two elegantly attired wakashu approaching a
waterfall which descends from a pine-clad cliff
and at far left three women, one of the them
brandishing an exaggeratedly long kiseru
(tobacco pipe). 122cm x 287.2cm
(48in x 113¼in).

£8,000 - 12,000
JPY1,100,000 - 1,700,000
US$9,900 - 15,000

The overall composition of this lot, with
a mansion at right and a garden with a
waterfall to the left, echoes the right-hand
half of a remarkable pair of smaller screens of
Amusements in a Mansion recently acquired
by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New
York and currently on display in the Japanese
Galleries (inv. no.2017.37.1, .2); the similarities
even extend to certain details such as the tipsy
guest (in the Metropolitan screen a Buddhist
monk but in the present lot a wealthy member
of the samurai or merchant class) seated on
the corner of the engawa (veranda) surrounded
by young people who ply him with food, drink,
and flattery. As in the Metropolitan screen,
the participants in the merrymaking include
not only female entertainers but also young
male escorts of the ‘third gender’ of wakashu,
considered potential sexual partners for both
older men and women, dressed in costumes
almost as gorgeous as those sported by the
female entertainers. The depiction of wakashu
in Edo-period art is the subject of the current
exhibition at Japan Society, New York, ‘A Third
Gender: Beautiful Youths in Japanese Prints’.

184* TP

ANONYMOUS
Edo period (1615-1868)
A six-panel folding screen, painted in ink
and colours on a silver paper ground and
interspersed with gold clouds, depicting
revellers, samurai and courtesans with their
junior attendants, the costumes and hairdos
broadly in the style of the mid-seventeenth
century, one of the samurai disguised as a
komuso mendicant monk wearing a
distinctive straw hat.
120cm x 355cm (47¼in x 159¾in).

£8,000 - 12,000
JPY1,100,000 - 1,700,000
US$9,900 - 15,000

112 | BONHAMS