is a 1902 painting by yōga artist Fujishima Takeji (1867–1943). Inspired by nostalgia for the Tempyō era 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. It is part of the collection of the Ishibashi Foundation. Description 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. Beneath the angled branches of the vertical paulownia, the figure—according to one theory, the Empress Kōmyō herself—stands barefooted, her weight on her right leg. Wearing a high striped skirt, her hair is bound high in a double top-knot, in the manner of noble ladies of the period known as or . She holds an ornately lacquered sixteen string kugo, modelled on one in the Shōsōin. A contemporary review in the Miyako Shimbun highlights the air of mystery and imagination that accompanies her seemingly calm poise. 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". Background In the words of Ernest Fenollosa, "we can know the material side of Tempyo [minutely] through the Shosoin Museum". After the 1878 gift to the Imperial Household of 319 treasures from Hōryū-ji, to be placed at the new precursor to the Tokyo National Museum, and the early Meiji inventories of the Shōsōin, study and appreciation of early Japanese art grew apace, as reflected in the early moves for the preservation of cultural properties that culminated in the 1897 Ancient Temples and Shrines Preservation Law, supplementary provisions to which extended protection to treasures in their charge. History Part of the contemporary so-called , 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. Other sketches include figures in long striped skirts, based on the Nara-period Illustrated