Beauty with Fireflies
copy after Kubo Shunman (Japanese, 1757–1820)
early 1800s
- Medium
- Hanging scroll; ink and color on silk (ivory roller ends)
- Classification
- Painting
- Dimensions
- Mounted: 181.5 x 45.6 cm (71 7/16 x 17 15/16 in.); Painting: 95.6 x 33.2 cm (37 5/8 x 13 1/16 in.)
- Culture
- Japan, Edo period (1615–1868)
- Museum
- Cleveland Museum of Art, Japanese Art
- Credit line
- Gift of the Kelvin Smith Family
- Rights
- Public domain (CC0), as the museum states it.
- Who can see it
- Teens profiles and older: its museum says too little about what it shows to place it for younger viewers. How works are placed
View at the Cleveland Museum of Art
About this work
A young woman has passed beneath an aged willow tree as she strolls along a riverbank carrying a cage full of fireflies. The painting is a copy after Kubo Shunman, best known as a composer of witty verses in 31-syllables (kyōka) and designer of limited edition prints called surimono. Shunman was active during the mature era of ukiyo-e production, and his more formal paintings most often took as their subjects beautiful Chinese or Japanese women. Here, his imitator commemorates one of summer's most delightful evening pastimes, the observation of the flickering lights of the firefly. The woman is presented in a ubiquitous summer setting, a refreshingly cool and breezy riverbank in earshot of rustling willow leaves.
