Wednesday, May 11, 2016

Mystery Japanese print of
2 women under an umbrella


OK, we're going to need the art experts out there to step forward.

This art print, framed by a paper matte, was acquired, I believe, by my great-grandmother during a trip to Japan in the early 1960s. It ended up in an album of travel mementos and never saw the light of day again until Mom and I came across it during one of our (nearly) endless rounds of going through everything in the Oak Crest Lane house.1

The portion of the illustration that shows through the matte is about four inches wide.2

I'm easily impressed by artwork. And even with this just being a print, it's a really striking image of two Japanese women, bent forward and trying to stay under their umbrella in a rainstorm. One of the women is clearly a geisha (though it seems odd that her legs are white, too).

There's a signature on the right-hand side of the print, but I can't read Japanese, so we'll need some help there, too.

A Google image search didn't turn up anything helpful.

Shown below is the full image underneath the matte. As you can see, a good bit of the artist's work has been cropped out.

Thoughts and feedback welcome!


Footnotes
1. Among the other posts that refer The Great 505 Cleanout:
2. Speaking of inches, I'm currently reading Whatever Happened to the Metric System by John Bemelemans Marciano. The author was born in the same year as me (1970), and so we have that shared experience, unique to our generation, of being told in grade school in the late 1970s that the United States was going to the metric system and we had better get ready for it. And then we didn't.

1 comment:

  1. Did you ever find anything out? I have the same print and came upon your page through a reverse image search. Thanks.

    ReplyDelete