Reminiscence of the Tempyō Era

Inspired by nostalgia for the Tempyō era[1] and, like his Butterflies and covers for the literary magazine Myōjō, an influential exemplar of Meiji romanticism, it has been designated an Important Cultural Property.

[2] Fujishima Takeji combines Japanese elements, such as the tall vertical format of a hanging scroll, the gold background, and the timeless subject of a sinuous beauty beneath a tree, with a classicizing horizontal band, a low wall with a sculpted frieze in relief, all executed in the western-derived medium of oil upon canvas.

[9] Art historian Harada Minoru writes of how, in this work, as in Butterflies, the artist "has gone beyond the plein-air style that dominated his early paintings to create his own unique expression through delicacy of line and brushstroke, imaginative composition, and brilliant colour".

[11][12] Part of the contemporary so-called "Tempyō boom" (「天平ブーム」),[8] the artist's sketchbooks from this period include reworkings of the celebrated painted panels from a byōbu in the Shōsōin depicting a beauty under a tree, as well as of a lacquered kugo from the same repository of treasures; as in the 1895 replica, the original instrument instead features twenty-three strings.

[2] More recently, the painting, alongside Aoki Shigeru's 1904 A Good Catch or Harvest of the Sea, has provided the inspiration for composer Hirano Ichirō's (平野一郎) nineteen-minute Umi no Sachi / Tempyô no Omokage~Diptych for Soprano & Piano: after Kambara Ariake's Poetry.