File:Hanging scroll, painting (BM 1913,0501,0.314 12).jpg

Height: 80 centimetres

Width: 32.20 centimetres

Clark 1992

Until the Edo period Asazuma was an important port on the eastern shore of Lake Biwa. The prostitutes who worked there in boats were even celebrated in classical poetry. In the Genroku era (1688-1704) this was adapted as a subject for painting by Hanabusa Itcho (1652-1724), the renegade Kano painter, who portrayed an Asazuma prostitute seated in a shallow boat beneath the hanging branches of a willow gazing at the full moon, dressed in the costume of a 'shirabyoshi' dancer - gold court hat ('eboshi'), court hunting robe ('suikari') and fan - and carrying a small hand-drum ('ko-tsutsumi'). There is a tradition that the reason for Itcho's banishment to the island of Izu Miyakejima was that he had painted a picture parodying the habit of the fifth Shogun Tsunayoshi for playing the drum and singing 'nagauta' (recitative chanting) with his concubine Oden no kata in a boat on the lake in Fukiage Park. Itcho is supposed to have modified the subject into the prostitute from Asazuma after this incident, and certainly it was a popular theme for painters of the later Hanabusa school, as well as Ukiyo-e artists such as Harunobu, Eishi, Hokusai and, here, Hokuba.

At least five versions of the subject by Hokuba are known - two horizontal scrolls in which the prostitute is joined by an attendant in the prow of the boat (Ota 1985, no. 121; Nagoya 1987, no. 27) and two more vertical versions in which the prostitute admires her reflection and that of the full moon in the water (Idemitsu 1988, no. 142; Azabu Museum of Arts and Crafts). Apart from the British Museum painting, which may be slightly earlier, the other four versions all date from Hokuba's last period of activity during the Tempo era (1830-44), when he used the signature Teisai (the Azabu painting is dated in his seventy-first year, 1841).

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