Shunga. Jūji wagō o-tekagami (Figures d'unions harmonieuses durant 10 heures)

Unique album comprising ten original polychrome paintings on beige silk, laid down on gilt paper, with gilt and embossed floral endpapers. The final painting bears two red seals. Albums of this nature are almost invariably anonymous, making the presence of such seals - possibly identifying either the artist or the workshop - particularly unusual. Each composition occupies a square of silk measuring 16.8 × 16.8 cm. With the exception of three scenes incorporating a hanging curtain or folding screen, the compositions are devoid of background, focusing entirely on the figures, rendered with refined, highly stylised draughtsmanship and a deliberately restrained palette of warm browns heightened with touches of red against a beige ground.

Accordion album covered in blue silk decorated with gilt motifs. Preserved in its original two-part wooden case (24.5 × 28.5 cm), the lid bearing a contemporary manuscript inscription; the manuscript label on the album rubbed. Corners worn with small losses to the silk, rubbing to the gilt paper, occasional soiling and faint marginal waterstaining to several paintings. The survival of the original storage case, intended to conceal and protect an object of this nature, is itself uncommon. The proposed dating, circa 1880, remains necessarily tentative: as a unique painted object, it cannot be securely dated by external evidence, although the restrained style and simplified palette are entirely consistent with production during the Meiji period.

The term shunga (春画), literally "spring pictures"- "spring" being a traditional euphemism for sexuality in Japanese - designates Japanese erotic art as a whole. Before this designation became widespread, painted and manuscript albums were commonly referred to as makura-e, or "pillow pictures". Among the most celebrated works in this tradition is the Utamakura ("Poem of the Pillow"), the celebrated suite of twelve erotic prints published in 1788, attributed to Kitagawa Utamaro and issued by Tsutaya Jūzaburō, now preserved, among other institutions, at the British Museum and widely regarded as one of the masterpieces of the genre.

Although the paintings in the present album retain several defining conventions of shunga - most notably the deliberate exaggeration of the genitalia and the use of drapery simultaneously to conceal and reveal the body - they stand apart through the exceptional refinement of their execution. Far removed from the more demonstrative character of Edo-period erotic woodblock prints, they favour an economy of line, a deliberately restrained chromatic range, and compositions in which male and female figures are accorded an unusually balanced presence. This restraint lends the album an elegance of remarkable distinction.

The Meiji period (1868 - 1912), marked by a programme of Westernisation and public moral reform, witnessed the gradual introduction of increasingly restrictive legislation concerning erotic imagery, with the first censorship measures appearing as early as 1869. Combined with the growing popularity of Western-style erotic photography, this changing cultural climate helps explain the rarity of painted albums from the period, few of which bear signatures or dates, many eventually finding their way into European and American collections during the height of the Japonisme movement.

A rare survival of the painted shunga tradition at the dawn of the Meiji era, this unique album combines the rarity of an original hand-painted work, preserved in its original wooden case, with a level of artistic refinement seldom encountered among the better-known Japanese erotic prints.