Page 36 - mar 21 Japanese and korean art Bonhams

2076
ANONYMOUS
Interior with Kimono, Clothes Racks, and Furniture
Edo period (1615-1868), late 17th/early 18th century
Six-panel folding screen, ink, colors, and gold on paper with gold
leaf, with silk surround and lacquered-wood frame, depicting a
variety of silk kosode and other garments, decorated in tie-dye,
stencil-dye, embroidery, and other techniques, an uchiwa fan, and
an inro draped on a lacquered iko (clothes rack), to its left a shodana
(set of shelves), a stylized pile of folded garments, and the beginning
of a set of shoji screens
61 1/4 x 136 1/2in (155.5 x 346.7cm)
US$25,000 - 35,000
Known today by the collective title Tagasode (Whose Sleeves?),
screens depicting garments, usually without human figures, were
first painted around the early seventeenth century. While some
of the earlier examples are painted with kosode draped on racks
against a plain gold background, from the mid-seventeenth century
some screens began to include other domestic interior elements.
The composition of the present lot shares features with a pair in the
Nezu Museum, Tokyo, in particular the shoji screens at the left and
the stylized pile of kosode lying in front of the shodana shelves. As
noted by textile scholar Kirihata Ken in connection with another pair
of screens, these piles of kosode are depicted as if viewed from
above in order to show the maximum number of different designs;
indeed it seems as if the artists’ overall purpose in these later
screens was to create a kind of large-scale fashion album designed
to appeal to female members of the Kyoto military and mercantile
elite. See Takeda Tsuneo and others, Nihon byobu-e shusei (Survey
of Japanese Screens), 14, Fuzokuga: Yuraku, tagasode (Genre
Entertainments, Kimono Screens), Tokyo, Kodansha, 1977, cat. nos.
95-96, 103.

2076 (detail)

34 | BONHAMS