Arcadópolis
Woman Fulling Cloth in the Moonlight (detail)
What you see
A crouching woman fills almost the entire detail. One hand lifts a wooden mallet above her head; the other steadies a roll of cloth on a low stand at left. Her body twists along a diagonal, from the raised mallet down to the bare foot at lower right. Her head is wrapped in a cloth and her eyes are lowered.
There is no landscape: the ground is a plain ocher, and this fragment shows neither the moon nor any other sign of night. The color lies in her clothing: an olive kimono with blue flowers, a sash patterned with hexagons and ruffled red linings. Look at the pink grain of the wood, the red cord tying back her sleeves and the blue design on her head cloth.
About Katsushika Ōi
Katsushika Ōi, whose given name was Ei, was a daughter of Hokusai and one of the very few prominent women painters of Edo-period Japan. After a brief marriage to the painter Minamizawa Tōmei, whose work she reportedly mocked, she returned to her father’s household and worked beside him until his death in 1849. She excelled at pictures of beautiful women and at dramatic effects of light and shadow, yet only about ten works are attributed to her today.
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