Page 247 - japanese and korean art Utterberg Collection Christie's March 22 2022

PROPERTY FROM THE COLLECTION OF THE JAPAN UKIYO-E MUSEUM, MATSUMOTO

PROPERTY FROM THE COLLECTION OF THE JAPAN UKIYO-E MUSEUM, MATSUMOTO
96
KATSUSHIKA HOKUSAI (1760-1849)
Ono no Komachi Invoking Rain (Amagoi Komachi), mid-1810s
Signed Hokusai aratame Taito hitsu, sealed Musashi shimofusa
Hanging scroll; ink and color on paper
50º x 24Ω in. (127.6 x 62.2 cm.)
$150,000-250,000

PROVENANCE:
Sakai Family collection, Matsumoto, by descent to Sakai Tokichi
(1915–1993)
EXHIBITED:
Tokyu Nihonbashi Department Store Galleries, Tokyo, “Sakai
korekushon: Ukiyoe 300-nen kessaku ten / Three Hundred Years
of Ukiyo-e: Exhibition of Masterpieces from the Sakai Collection,”
October 18–27, 1968
LITERATURE:
Nihon Keizai Shinbunsha and Nihon Ukiyoe Honzonkai, Sakai
korekushon: Ukiyoe 300-nen kessaku ten / Three Hundred Years of
Ukiyo-e: Exhibition of Masterpieces from the Sakai Collection (Tokyo:
Otsuka Kogeisha, 1968), no. 59.

The poet Ono no Komachi served in an unknown capacity at
the imperial court in Kyoto during the mid-ninth century. Her
surviving work consists of eighteen attributed waka poems honored
for their candor, introspection and unforced complexity.

Legend was quick to make a sketch of the person behind the
intense words. Designated one of the six poet immortals of
antiquity (Rokkasen) by Ki no Tsurayuki (872–945) and one of
the thirty-six masters of poetry (Sanjurokkasen) by Fujiwara no
Kinto (966–1041), she was already a literary icon. By the eleventh
century, the Komachi image was in place as a woman of matchless
beauty and wit who was proud of her passions and disdainful of
her many lovers. Five medieval plays for the Noh theater chart her
triumphs and eventual fall into decrepitude, penury and madness.
In Five Modern Noh Plays, Yukio Mishima set her in a 1950s Tokyo
park as a hag scavenging for cigarette butts who magically summons
her former self to seduce a young poet––an experience so profound
that it causes his death.