shunga;
print
- Museum number
- OA+,0.135.3
- Title
- Series: Sode no maki 袖の巻 (Handscroll for the Sleeve)
- Description
-
Woodblock print, shunga. Two lovers, the woman with blackened teeth, customary at the time for married women, the man entering her from behind.
- Production date
- 1785 (circa)
- Dimensions
-
Height: 12.60 centimetres
-
Width: 69.90 centimetres
- Curator's comments
- This is the most celebrated shunga work by Torii Kiyonaga. Within the strikingly long, horizontal format, very narrow in height, are presented eleven scenes of sexual coupling and in the twelfth, close-ups of three female sex organs within round windows. The title Handscroll for the Sleeve was taken by shunga scholar Hayashi Yoshikazu from a phrase in the printed preface: ‘The charms of a beautiful woman... captured in a handscroll for the sleeve’ The figures of the couples are cropped in an extraordinary and memorable way within the unusually long, narrow format, and the undulating lines that express their bodies, as well as the richness and variety of their expressions are truly beautiful. This is certainly one of the great masterpieces within the shunga tradition. A rich variety of types is portrayed, and in many different bodily poses: a young couple dressed in the courtly costumes of Ushiwakamaru (the future warrior hero Yoshitsune) and Princess Jo- ruri; a maid from a warrior mansion with her distinctive ‘horn-hiding’ (tsuno-kakushi) head-cloth; a young female firewood-seller, from the village of Ohara near Kyoto, and her lover using her bundle of sticks as a pillow (see Clark et al 2013, p. 156, fig. 2); a middle-aged couple relaxing in a pleasurable drowse after sex; young adolescents who have forgotten all about their calligraphy practice; a woman wearing a special white narrow sash to support her pregnant stomach, and so on. There are quite a few examples of shunga being made in the formats of small handscrolls and books. In fact, the special term ‘sleeve treasure’ (shu-chin) was used to describe small things that were slipped inside the breast or hanging sleeve of a traditional kosode kimono. No doubt people enjoyed them in this way, carrying them around, or hiding them in the small drawer on the side of a pillow-stand in the bedroom. [YY]
- Location
- Not on display
- Exhibition history
-
Exhibited:
2013 3 Oct - 2014 5 Jan, London, BM, Shunga: Sex and pleasure in Japanese art, 1600-1900
- Department
- Asia
- Registration number
- OA+,0.135.3