Page:The Surviving Works of Sharaku (1939).djvu/316

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n illustration of the famous story,, the Maple Picnic. The tale relates that Taira no Koreshige went out to view the autumn maples and fell in with a party of young girls whose picnic he shared happily until one of them suddenly turned into a gigantic demon and tried to kill him.

This print and another which Rumpf reproduces as his number 43, but which we have ventured to consider spurious, stand somewhat apart from the rest of Sharaku’s work, and neither of the two is known to exist in more than a single impression. The one here under discussion was reproduced as Rumpf number 44, and last appeared as number 113 in a Japanese auction held in April, 1937, from the catalogue of which we have rephotographed it. The coloring has not been described, in so far as we have been able to ascertain, except for that of the background. The date cannot be determined accurately, but from the signature and other bits of circumstantial evidence we would assign it to the close of 1794 or the beginning of 1795.

Aiban. Yellow ground. Signed: Sharaku.