Kiyohara Yukinobu

UPDATE: 15/03/07--the image is here!

Just a reminder, in case you missed the post heralding my current project, March is Women's History Month. I'll be posting about women artists all month long. After my post about Louise Nevelson, who is quite famous, I decided to focus on women who aren't so well-known (or at least those who were hitherto totally unknown to me).


So far, there has been a definite focus on France, and I don't know about you but I'm getting wanderlusty. Not that France isn't all that. It really, really is, but there's a world full of women out there and the month is already nearly half over. Today, we're leaving the continent all together and moving far, far east.

Art was every bit as much a man's pursuit in Japan as it was in Europe during the 1600s, the century in which Kiyohara Yukinobu lived. Painting was one among the "Four Accomplishments" that upper-class men cultivated (the other three were music, calligraphy, and the chess-like game go). But Yukinobu's father was a master Kano-school painter, and so she had access to a world that normally would have excluded her.

I've tried off and on for the better part of an hour to upload a good example of her paining, but alas, blogger will not comply. You can find one at the Kyoto National Museum. The link will take you to their search page. Enter Yukinobu's name, and you'll find it. I recommend that you use their picture viewer to magnify the image as much as you can. Her brushwork is amazing.

I have not been able to find much else about her life or work. I can see a trip to the library in my future. Just as soon as good reserach libraries re-enter my world of possibilities.