Description:
woman; costume/uniform

Label Text:
Catherine Spicer Hubley, class of 1932, gave the museum this exceptional two-panel Japanese screen of “Women of Fashion at Leisure,” a popular genre subject of the Edo period (1615-1868). With splendid decoration and delicate details, this panel screen depicts that three beautiful courtesans, accompanied by two young maids, are engaged in fashionable pastimes of the seventeenth century—reading tales on a scroll, playing a three-string shamisen and smoking tobacco with a long pipe—in the setting of an open porch facing a garden of flowering cherry trees and wisteria. Their graceful poses, latest hairdos and gorgeously-decorated robes showcasing the beauty of the floating world, which would have delighted Edo spectators—as they do us today. Fan Zhang

Link to share this object record:
https://museums.fivecolleges.edu/detail.php?t=objects&type=ext&id_number=SC+1973.14

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