Osaka Steamship #5
Comments: 11
It all comes together in this one, my favourite of the bunch. It’s a superb illustration and perfectly pitched advertising, beautifully executed and richly sentimental.
A late winter afternoon turns golden and the fragrance of the plum tree brightens as the air chills. An exquisitely turned out creature who could be a young woman or yet but a girl has been amusing herself at play while awaiting someone’s return by sea. She sits on the verandah, her Osaka Steamship kite propped against the house behind her, in a luminous and cloyingly well-composed image of domestic warmth. We know there has been anticipation, but of what kind? Her gaze — is it just banal? Oh, inscrutable Orient! — is absolutely unreadable.
She is bound to the image — is it the man she is to marry who returns? — by the promise of spring: trees and flowers link her graphically and organically to foreground and background elements and suggest that her role in this domestic universe is as simple and ordered as the plum tree’s, whose branch seems to entwine, chastely, the floral design on her kimono just below her knee. The design sweeps up to her hand which holds a racquet whose brush of bamboo carries our gaze across her obi to the continuing effloresence on her collar. Her head is perfectly superimposed against a pine tree on the bluff at the end of the garden so that the flowers in her hair seem almost part of it rather than her.
She’s not just home, in the sense that she comfortably occupies the landscape, she is the landscape. And now, thanks to Osaka Steamship and her awaited one’s return, that landscape will be complete.
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Posted to Advertising • 2006.09.02 (Sat) • 20:31
Comments
Posted by Mark 2006.09.03, 00:47
Her eyes have a 100-yard stare, like she’s just been shot in the back. She even looks propped up against the house.
She’s dead, Jim.
Posted by Massimo 2006.09.05, 19:56
Simply beautiful!
Posted by jh 2006.09.05, 21:58
Isn’t it great. I love this one. (And she’s not dead, just … inscrutable.)
Posted by ashley 2006.10.07, 08:24
Really great portrait of a chinese woman when would say it was made, early 18 th century?
Posted by RC Cars Nut 2006.10.11, 23:00
Wow, great art and a great description to go along with it, thanks.
Posted by sn 2006.10.21, 00:30
Is this a lithograph-style “block” from which lithograph prints would be made? I ask because the writing is reading (inverted) R to L (Osaka Shipping Company and address below)
As in other posts, a classic look, with a good interpretation.
Posted by Shay 2006.10.27, 15:20
That’s a great picture…I love the colors and the style. Vintage is so cool. :P
Posted by James 2007.01.27, 10:32
I like the “Qifu” the dress which was originally from China, however it becomes more a tradition in Japan. I really like it.
Posted by Purifier 2007.02.17, 19:33
Wow, it’s amazing! Feel like back to the old item, very tranditional.
Posted by Purifier 2007.02.17, 19:34
Wow, it’s amazing! Feel like back to the old item, very tranditional.
Posted by Dan Howitt 2007.03.23, 15:51
It is great. Really incredible! Dan Howitt UK London
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