Beauty Under the Cherry Blossoms

A young woman dances beneath a cherry tree decorated with a lantern and a tanzaku, a slip of paper with a poem on it. During cherry blossom season in Japan, groups of revelers come out to view the flowers, sing, dance, and drink. The woman depicted here echoes the tree by wearing a kimono patterned with cherry blossoms, and her graceful hands are tipped with deep-pink fingernails that match the leaves and buds above. The artist, Enomoto Chikatoshi, painted bijinga, a genre of art that focused on beautiful women. He frequently showed his work at the government-sponsored juried exhibitions in Tokyo of the 1920s and ’30s.