Original Haori Designs

Wrappers. String. . Very Good. 72 original watercolors, all whimsical and colorful. N.d., circa 1910s. 38 by 29 cm. Cover and first page with Japanese calligraphy, hand-written. Following are leaves with paintings, all by hand. Contents only on top side of leavest throughout, and no text after two first two leaves. Opens vertically -- bound on top. Haori jackets are overcoats worn over kimonos. That said, the paintings all work as artwork on their own. Their style is deliberately naive, as befitting a children's book's illustrations, which these could across-the-board be. Here children, often a little chunky, are cavorting, playing, frolicking. Musicians, actors, fisherman, farmers, aristocrats people other paintings. The adult subjects, among other things, might be praying, riding horses which are more like merry-go-round mounts, or socializing. Other animals appearing include turtles, fish, birds, dogs, mice, sometimes anthropormorphically presented. Backdrops are occasional, but include Mount Fuji, cherry trees and other typical Japanese totems. A rich blue is the dominant color, serving as the background color, with reds, golds, greens used to flesh out and detail the figures and the illustration. Regardless, all the figures have a cartoonish quality. Condition: cover very soiled, creased, dog-eared with chipping in corner and along edges. First few leaves also dog-eared. Given the thinness and tissue-like quality of the paper, the creasing is inevitable, but the type of paper is also quite forgiving of this. Following the top leaves, occasional edge discoloration, and some roughness to edges periodically. But generally, and most important, the paintings are bright and vivid.