Makimono Makurae (images d'oreiller). 12 peintures

Painted handscroll, or makimono, comprising twelve paintings on silk with a transparent ground, mounted end to end to form a long continuous strip measuring 840 cm - that is, twelve panels of 70 x 14 cm - laid down on paper and edged with gold along its slips. When fully unrolled, the supporting paper strip measures 869 cm. Scroll mounted on a wooden rod and preserved in its original green silk wrapper. Some foxing and localised staining affect certain panels, without impairing the harmony of the whole, which remains in satisfactory condition.

Unsigned, this scroll is stylistically related to the circle of Miyagawa Shuntei (1873-1914), a painter and illustrator trained under Tomioka Eisen, and may be dated to the early decades of the twentieth century.

This scroll belongs to the late production of the makura-e genre, the “pillow pictures” better known today as shunga. After the Meiji Restoration, their production declined sharply under the effect of a policy of moral modernisation in Japan. Police raids, carried out notably between 1895 and 1905, led to the confiscation and destruction of numerous works; the subject long remained taboo, until the Taishō era. This scarcity accounts for the singular, almost surviving presence of works executed during this period.

The hypothesis of a link with the circle of Miyagawa Shuntei is not without foundation. A pupil of the painter and illustrator Tomioka Eisen, Shuntei belonged to that milieu of printmaking and painting at the end of the Meiji period in which the elegance of the figures, the delicacy of the colours and the suppleness of the line could still be placed at the service of subjects that official morality was already striving to make disappear. Several shunga works attributed to Shuntei and dated to around 1900 are recorded in reference databases on Japanese prints, attesting at least to the plausibility of his occasional practice of the genre during his lifetime.

The narrow, continuous-strip composition, proper to the makimono, gives the ensemble its distinctive rhythm: the scenes are not offered to the eye all at once; they are discovered gradually, as the scroll is unrolled, as though the support itself governed expectation, restraint and then revelation.

A complete and rare ensemble of twelve paintings on silk belonging to late shunga, preserved in its original scroll mounting, with a refined palette and in overall satisfactory condition. A work discreet by necessity, precious by survival, whose cautious attribution to the circle of Miyagawa Shuntei further enhances the charm of images that, in order to endure, had to learn the art of concealment.