2-725-843 - Heritage Art/Heritage Images

Chinese Beauty, late 1700s-early 1800s. Kubo Shunman is best known as a composer of comic verse and designer of high quality prints known simply as "printed things" (surimono) on which such verses typically appeared. However, he also painted larger scale but equally detailed images like this one, which portrays an elegant Chinese woman standing before a banana plant. In keeping with the painting’s sensibility, the verse inspired by the scene and inscribed at the top is in Chinese, and executed in a refined and handsome style. Shunman’s signature at the lower right indicates that he painted the work with his left hand.