Three Women Playing Musical Instruments

Three women make music together, the kind of trio Edo listeners called sankyoku, with a koto, a shamisen and a kokyū, a small bowed fiddle. They do not come from the same world. The koto player has been identified as a young apprentice courtesan in long swinging sleeves, the shamisen player as a geisha, and the woman with the bow as a townswoman. One of the figures at the centre turns her back to us, an unusual choice in a picture of beautiful women.

Ōi painted the scroll on silk at some point between 1818 and 1844, the years she spent working beside her father Hokusai in his studio. This one carries her own signature and seal at the lower right.

The Boston physician William Sturgis Bigelow built much of his Japanese collection while he lived in Japan in the 1880s, and he gave this scroll to the museum in 1911.