New Year's Pine Tree Festival

In 1910, Oberlin President Henry Churchill King learned that one of America's leading Asian art collectors, Charles L. Freer (1854-1919), was dispersing the portions of his collection that had not already been donated to the Smithsonian Institution, and giving them to other museums and academic institutions around the country. King quickly wrote to Freer and requested a donation for Oberlin College. Lengthy negotiations ensued, and, in 1912, Freer sent Oberlin a gift of one hundred Chinese and Japanese paintings, ceramics, and sculptures that he hoped would, in his words, "aid some of your students to a better knowledge of the Far East." This scroll painting was one of the most important works of art in that gift.

The painting depicts a number of archetypal female figures standing and sitting in a landscape setting. The elegant character in the upper right corner is identifiable by her clothing and hairstyle as a consort of the Shogun, and is accompanied by a welldressed maid. In contrast to this aristocratic pair, the woman in the lower right corner is a humble commoner who is portrayed wearing simple clothes and lighting a pipe. The group of women in the center of the picture includes a high-ranking courtesan and her two attendants. Immediately to their left is a group of townswomen whose clothes suggest different levels of wealth and marital status. Finally, in the left background are three rustic women who are also of different ages and social status. What ostensibly unites this fanciful parade of women whose paths would never cross in real life is the "festival of pulling the young pines" (komatsu-hiki). This ancient festival involved women going out into the countryside on a specified day shortly after the lunar New Year and collecting pine saplings to celebrate the rejuvenation and fertility of spring. Although this festival had occasionally been depicted in earlier Japanese painting, it was not a common subject and this representation of it with so many different types of contemporary women is especially unusual.

This scroll is an example of the Japanese genre ukiyo-e, literally "Pictures of the Floating World." Ukiyo-e encompasses a large body of paintings and prints that depict the characters, places, and activities associated with Japanese leisure culture as it evolved between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. Teisai Hokuba was one of the best ukiyo-e painters of the nineteenth century. Born into a samurai family, Hokuba was a student of the great master Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849). In addition to painting, he also designed woodblock prints and book illustrations. This painting belongs to the last phase of Hokuba's career, around 1830 to 1844, when his creative imagination and technical skills were at their highest. The scroll would likely have been specially commissioned and was probably quite expensive. At the time it was painted, it must have been a family treasure. But for reasons unknown, it was sold in the late nineteenth century and eventually ended up in Oberlin, where its frequent use by faculty and students continues to fulfill the hopes of its donor.