Men dancing to samisen music, from the series Shokoku meibutsu (Famous products of the provinces)

This Japanese woodblock print is an attractive example of a surimono. These limited-edition, privately commissioned works are finely crafted; smaller than an ōban, they often combine verse and image in complementary arrangement. The riotous scene here depicts two dishevelled men reeling drunkenly around a sedate geisha. Toyota Hokkei’s (1780-1850) Men dancing to samisen music captures the spirit of the male world of Edokko (Edo period) hedonism as it emerged in the course of the early 19th century. Like his contemporary Utagawa Toyohiro, also represented in the collection, Hokkei has employed gauffrage embossing to contrive subtle details of clothing patterns, textures and the geisha’s slender fingers twisting around the neck of the samisen. The beautiful young woman, the fluttering candle and the drunken moment itself, all remind viewers of the theme of transience, the fragility of beauty and pleasure, and the inevitable passage of time.

This sentiment mirrors the poignant sensibility of mono no aware, a sensitivity to the essential pathos of things, that has informed Japanese verse since Heian times. The theme is echoed in the hourglass-shaped mon above the signatures at lower left, and on the garment of the man at top left. The symbol resembles the number five, identifying the commissioning group and poets featured in the composition as members of the Gogawa, or Group of Five Poetry Club, active through the first four decades of the 19th century. The Gogawa were closely associated with the Ichikawa family of kabuki actors.

See: David Bell, 'Floating world at Te Papa: the Heriot collection', Tuhinga, 30 (2019), pp. 56-81.

Dr Mark Stocker  Curator, Historical International Art   May 2019