Women Beside a Stream Chasing Firefliesc. 1796–97
A group of women amuse themselves by chasing fireflies next to a stream. A sense of movement is conveyed by their sleeves fluttering in the breeze. More about this work
About this work
A group of women amuse themselves by chasing fireflies next to a stream. A sense of movement is conveyed by their sleeves fluttering in the breeze.
Text from the Cleveland Museum of Art.
How it was made
- Colour woodblock print
- In Japan these were a team effort. The artist drew the design, a carver cut it into cherry-wood blocks, one block for each colour, and a printer brushed on the pigment and rubbed each sheet by hand. Full-colour prints of this kind were called nishiki-e, “brocade pictures”, from the 1760s on.
Chôbunsai Eishi
Japanese, 1756–1829
Eishi was born into a high-ranking samurai family and studied painting with the Kanō master Kanō Eisen’in, serving for a time as a painter to the shogun Tokugawa Ieharu. He then turned to ukiyo-e, and in the 1790s designed elegant pictures of tall, graceful courtesans and aristocratic women, often in multi-sheet compositions. Around 1800 he gave up woodblock design to concentrate on painting.
Written by Ochre Editions.
Ukiyo-e
Japanese woodblock prints of the floating world: actors, courtesans, landscapes and the sea.
Rights and the museum’s record
Public domain. The Cleveland Museum of Art has dedicated this image to the public domain under CC0, so anyone may copy, adapt and use it, for any purpose, without asking. Our prints and files are reproductions made from the museum’s image; the museum doesn’t endorse them.
- Object number
- 1920.523
- Credit
- Courtesy of the Cleveland Museum of Art
- Type
- Department
- Japanese Art
- Licence
- CC0 1.0 Universal
- Museum record
- See it on the museum’s site
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