#japanese

From what I can find this is a page out of a picture-book of Edo views — comic poems up top, a small scene printed underneath, the whole thing bound and sold to be flipped through rather than hung anywhere. The verses are by several different people, not by the one who drew the pictures.

I couldn't find much on this particular scroll, but Bugaku is an old Japanese court dance tradition - apparently dancers have performed in costumes like this one for well over a thousand years.

This is one stretch of a long handscroll — apparently there are eleven of these sections, meant to be unrolled a bit at a time rather than hung on a wall. The painter was, they say, a samurai retainer who did this on the side.

It's a print rather than a painting — one of thirty-six goes at the same mountain, run off the blocks in the thousands and sold cheap, more or less a poster. The blue doing all the heavy lifting was a newish imported pigment then, according to Wikipedia, which is part of why it looks the way it does.