Her Brush, Her Needle: Rethinking the Relationship between Art and Artisanal Work by Women in Early Modern Japan
- Marcia A. Yonemoto
The exhibition Her Brush: Japanese Women Artists from the Fong-Johnstone Collection focuses, commonsensically, on works identified as art, predominantly by Japanese women, most of whom were identified in their lifetimes as artists. Acknowledging the obvious—that the terms “art” and “artist” are modern, necessarily convenient, and in the English language—I would nonetheless like to reconsider what types of work might fall under the rubric of “art” and what types of people we might call “artists,” particularly in early modern Japan (c. 1590–1868).
I am not an art historian but a cultural historian who dabbles in visual sources. This background gives me some license (at least in my own mind) to explore the somewhat arbitrary but nonetheless pervasive boundary between art and artisanal work by women in the early modern period. I propose that querying this boundary gives us insight into how and why artisanal work by women was ubiquitous, while women artists were relatively few. If we look to the types of art represented in Her Brush—painting, calligraphy, ceramics—we can note that elite women of the upper levels of the samurai class and of the nobility received instruction in the literary arts, including calligraphy, as a matter of course. With the growth of educational opportunities for commoners beginning in the late seventeenth century, women’s literacy and numeracy overall increased significantly over the course of the early modern period. Many of the instructional manuals for women that proliferated from the late seventeenth century on focused not only on literacy and literature but on calligraphy and formal letter-writing as well. In short, the calligraphic arts were well established among elite women from the beginning of the early modern period and spread to the commoner classes gradually over time. However, painting and ceramics remained more specialized pursuits.
But there were other forms of what we might call artistic or artisanal practice that were widely accessible and were, in fact, deemed necessary for women of all classes. From an early age, women were taught certain productive and creative skills because they were required of a capable homemaker. Sewing, spinning, and weaving were foremost among them, and even women of the elite classes were expected to master these skills, though in practice they might rely on servants to do such work for them. This was because needlework was not just work; its mastery constituted a core virtue for women. Popular instructional manuals for women often invoked the divine origins of needlework, passed down as it was from the Needle Princess (hari hime) during the age of the gods. “There is no greater skill for women than sewing,” states the Treasure Chest of the Greater Learning for Women (Onna daigaku takarabako, c. 1716), for it was not simply productive, it was edifying, and its proper practice would “set [a woman’s] heart right.” Indeed, one could argue that the needle rivaled and perhaps superseded the brush in terms of its importance in fundamentally shaping as well as expressing a woman’s character.
Women also took charge of raising silkworms and spinning silk thread, formulating dyes and dyeing fabrics, and making paper and paper goods. They engaged in a host of small craft manufactures, crafting fans, umbrellas and parasols, rosaries (juzu), and decorative twisted cord (mizuhiki); braiding rope; and creating and sharpening needles. This artisanal work was often done in households, sometimes jointly with men. In rural areas, it was done in the off-season and during downtime from agricultural work.
These artisanal practices required diligence and manual dexterity, but equally importantly, they demanded a well-honed aesthetic sensibility: an eye for proportion, balance, and symmetry, a measuring gaze that could appreciate symmetrical stitches or an even weave, and a discerning appreciation of pattern and color. Like the barrel makers in Michael Baxandall’s classic book Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy,1 whose calculating eyes instinctively visualized volume and allowed them to keenly appreciate the material worlds depicted in Renaissance painting, Japanese women artisans learned not only how to look at things but how to perceive what was essential in those things in order to make them into something beautiful, something more than an assemblage of constituent parts. Illustrations in instructional manuals show how this sensibility was integral to craft itself: in a section on dyeing fabric in Kyō hyakunin isshu wabunkō (an instructional Hundred Poems for a Hundred Poets from the Japanese Archive, 1829), an illustration shows two women looking at a printed depiction, on paper, of a completed kimono. One of the women is pointing her finger at the print, indicating, it seems, the color or pattern she seeks to replicate through the dyeing process described in the text itself. This, she seems to say, is how it should be—she has absorbed the information, she possesses the skills and materials, she has made her choice, she envisions the outcome. But is she an artist? And is the kimono she will sew out of the fabric she will dye (and perhaps even wove herself) become a work of art? To push the question further, as craft production became more specialized and refined, when did, for example, a fine patterned silk brocade cease to be a useful commodity and become a piece of art with intrinsic aesthetic value? And who got the credit for that product—the woman artisan who wove it or the male shop owner (perhaps her father or husband) who displayed, marketed, and sold it to discerning customers?
Watch Marcia A. Yonemoto's Symposium Presentation
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Michael Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1972). ↩︎