Katsushika Oi – Cherry Trees at Night

I was recently enjoying reading Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin when I came across a reference to this artwork. The novel is set in the 1990s world of pioneering computer game design and manages to appeal even to non-gamers like me, largely because it paints such a compelling picture of the central characters’ personalities, their brilliant minds, their motivations, their loves and losses and ultimately their more important friendships. It helps of course that the book is so well-written particularly when it explores the liminal space between the fictional world of the games and the real world. It made me think about the way that paintings can stand as simulacra of life, avatars that can sometimes outshine real-world actuality.

Katsushika Ōi, Girl Composing a Poem under the Cherry Blossoms in the Night, mid nineteenth century, colour on silk, Menard Art Museum, Komaki City, Aichi, Japan

Anyway, the mention of Katsushika Ōi, the daughter of Japan’s most famous artist of the late Edo period, Katsushika Hokusai, prompted me to get googling as I am ashamed to admit that I had not heard of her. One of the characters in the book believes that the talents of the artistic daughter eclipsed those of the father and cites this work in evidence. It is a depiction of a young woman composing a poem at nighttime. The cherry trees of the title, whose blossom is so emblematic of Japanese culture and sensibility, are mostly hidden; they are merely silhouetted (with the exception of one trunk) and one explanation for this artistic decision is that they stand as a metaphor for the self-effacement expected of creative women – just as the blossom remains (largely) in shadow so the slate that the woman writes on is blank. It seems to make the point that she (the figure) is capable of conjuring the words whose beauty will reveal themselves just as surely as will the blossom reappear with the morning sunrise and just as surely as the artist achieves by depicting this scene in front of us.

The work is remarkable for the way that it evokes the beauty of what lies in darkness, beauty from tones of charcoal grey and black, beauty from the antithesis of colour. Its theme is illumination, literal and figurative. The light from the candle in the large lamp lights up the face of the central figure as she looks for inspiration. The flame of inspiration lends her its glow – it burns brightly and floodlights the few visible blossoms to her right and left, both an encouragement and an enjoinder to create, while the lamp at the lower right lights up the sumptuous richness of her gown, its drapes connecting her to the grounded reality of the earth as her mind reaches closer to the celestial sphere of starier thought.

Artemisia Gentileschi, Self Portrait as the Allegory of Painting, 1638-39, oil on canvas, Royal Collection of the United Kingdom

The work is dated to the mid-nineteenth century but reminded me of another great self-declaration of female artistic legitimacy from the century before, Artemesia Gentileschi’s Self Portrait as the Allegory of Painting. While Ōi’s work is recognisably of the Ukiyo-e genre which would typically depict the sybaritic pleasures of the merchant classes, it transcends its decorative norms to speak more profoundly about the creative process itself, just as Artemisia breaks with the conventions of (self) portraiture to stake her claim for artistic recognition.

The Yozakura tradition in Japan, still enormously popular today, involves the viewing of cherry blossom at night when they are lit up and glow with a sublime and ghostly presence. The season for this lasts barely three or four months and so, a little like the swallows visiting us for the summer and then gathering before their long migration south, Yozakura combines an appreciation of beauty with a melancholy recognition of transience. The painting is redolent of such an emotion (expressed as ‘mono no aware’ in Japanese, or ‘the pathos of things’), except that its comprehension of the fleetingness of all life extends to the mystery of the human capacity to create – to create images or poems – ideas may come and go, and can be sometimes as difficult to summon as trying to catch the wind, but the practiced artist is more likely to accomplish this than most, and that too  should be celebrated for the strange impalpability of its operation.

The solitariness of the figure in this work also amplifies the idea of lonely struggle and difficulty. The artist must feel driven to create if she is to work without the social and moral support of family and friends or possibly, she can only do so when free from the obligations of her daytime existence. Her unfocussed eyes and her head-turned gaze evoke the idea of interiority, and project her mood, her mental disposition, her sense of mission.

However, setting aside some of this allegorical speculation, one of the things I like best about this painting is the resplendence of the figure’s clothing. The super-long and beautiful geometric simplicity of the bronze and black outlined yuliwa (snowflake) kimono design is vividly offset by the crimson lining of the nagajuban undergarment, the collar of which glows so strikingly against the woman’s milk-white face. The kanzashi headdress is inelaborate but haloes the head as if to gesture at the enlightenment expected within it.

I am intrigued by the shape made by the hand holding the pen. The delicately pointed fingers seem to clutch at it awkwardly and the thumb is held vertically against the back of the instrument, almost as if the woman is about to stab rather than write with it. However, while there is a certain fragility and elegance to the cocked wrist, the bareness of its exposure is also suggestive of a certain want of modesty. In the patriarchal Edo period, Japanese women were expected to keep the skin covered and although this figure conforms to the conventions and etiquette of the time by the maintenance of its pallor (particularly the face), the rolled-back sleeve is indicative of an uncommon lack of restraint, a small revolt against male expectations and perhaps a sign of the artist’s determination to prioritise the ‘hands-on’ making of her art over expectations of demureness. According to scholars, Ōi was known for her outspoken and uncompromising personality. She was derisive of her artist husband’s abilities and eventually divorced him, retreating to her father’s home where the pair, who were devoted to one another, collaborated on work they considered to be of far superior merit. It is said that Ōi ‘drank like a man and smoked tobacco’ so I can well imagine her railing against the rules of propriety and enjoying smuggling her challenge to them into her art.

The stars in the dark sky are stylised to show as blue, white and gold – they are arranged not in real astronomical constellations but in artfully gathered clusters whose pinpricks of light decorate the heavens and which are mirrored by the fallen blossoms and the stones on the ground shown at bottom left, lit by the lamp at bottom right. These again seem to represent brevity; their radiance seems as short-lived as a spark or a firework, but no less worthy of experiencing for all that.