Hello again. Module 2 is going to be about Painted Beauties, visual representations, images of women produced in Japan during the 19th century. We're going to take a look over a number of decades and also through various mediums: paintings, ukiyo-e, polychrome prints, black and white lithographs, photography. The 19th century is a very long century and especially in Japan there are enormous changes in the way reality is described, represented, and in the motivations for, the reasons for, engaging in cultural expression. During this module, I want to share with you some of the ideas that I've had, but especially, simply give us an opportunity to look through this repertory, the different ways that the female image, images of women who actually existed—in other words portraits of actual figures— but also idealized so-called beauty pictures, Bijin-ga, as we say in modern Japanese, how they developed and what the collaboration or the connection between these images was to the written word, written culture, at the same time. Let's start off with a painting that we've already seen in module one, the Portrait of a Geisha from 1838, by Watanabe Kazan. This young woman, again, she's presented here as in a state of disarray. She's just taken a bath. It's summer and she's cooling herself with her fan in her right hand, leaning back on her left arm. We don't really know where she is, what sort of situation she's in, the actual place that she might be actually resting in. But we know from her state of undress that she's just taken a bath. So she's probably at a bathhouse or she's just come back from the bathhouse to her own residence and is sort of about to dress. She's wearing a so-called summer yukata or light bathrobe, which men and women would wear to sort of absorb the sweat on a hot day, especially after a bath. And she's cooling herself with this fan in her right arm. We call this in Japanese, a mizu-uchiwa, which means it's a fan that's been dipped in water, which makes the paper half transparent. And when you fan yourself with it this sort of cool breeze comes as the water evaporates. Anyway, that allows Kazan to show her neck, the area around her collar, sort of the expression, the face line and so forth. It's a very, very delicately composed portrait. Also, the sort of tie-dyed patterns on her bathrobe and also the very, very sort of rich, thick sort of black obi, or tie, that she's sort of attached to her, the lower part of her body, which she hasn't tied yet. It lets us know that she's not, she's probably a merchant woman, but she's well-heeled and she has a lot of you know, a good taste and lot of good clothes as well. But she's portrayed very, very simply here. One of the important aspects of this portrait as a portrait or as an image of a woman is that she is pictured without her makeup on. We know that she's just come out of the bath, so she hasn't made herself up. But this representation of her in a very unguarded, you might say vulnerable, but extremely private— She's not thinking about or concerned with anyone's viewing her, or her space being sort of occupied or obstructed by someone. She seems to be pensive, thinking about something to herself. Not just her makeup, but her hair ornaments are very, very simple. She's using these, what we call in Japanese tsuge, or boxwood combs, which are very, very popular, very, very inexpensive. And she's not using any of the sort of silver, or ivory, or coral, incredible accoutrements that geisha would often use in this period, especially when they were preparing themselves to go out and entertain men. So it's a picture of a moment, perhaps late in the afternoon, of a young geisha who is in a very, very intimate, private situation, space, by herself, not occupied by the glance, what someone, perhaps a man, might be thinking of her as she's sitting there being looked at. We don't have a sense of a viewer at all within the portrait itself. Again, as we saw in the first module, it's always very important when we're looking at trying to appreciate or understand these 19th century portraits of men or women, it's important to look at the whole picture. In other words, not just what's being represented as a painting but what has been written, inscribed onto the painting by brush as words. Here again, Watanabe Kazan, in 1838, right after he paints this very, very affectionate, simple portrait of a young geisha dedicates a very long—I think it's six lines worth of classical Chinese prose—to the image that he's created, describing his relationship to her-the fact that she actually exists, she has a social existence, she's not a made up sort of you know, bromide glamorous sort of figure that doesn't really exist. So anyway, he gives us a very, very concise but nuanced, very, very delicately layered document concerning the image itself.
