Two Japanese girls sit close together on a sandy shore, angled inward over an open book they read together. The girl at left, with a short bob hairstyle, wears a dark green “Western-style” dress with a wide white lace-trimmed collar and black strap shoes; her short bob frames a softly lowered face. The girl at right wears a patterned kimono in black, gold, and rust tones, with a long dark braid falling over her shoulder. Her red sandals and the kimono’s layered design contrast with her companion’s “modern” 1920s dress and shoes. White flowers bloom in the grasses around them, and one flower rests across the book’s pages. Behind them, calm light blue water, distant mountains, white sails, and a small steamship stretch across a pale horizon. Their expressions are quiet and focused, creating an intimate, reflective mood shaped more by shared attention than by posed display. The fashion difference is very much worth discussing, because it is one of the painting’s central ideas. The pairing of a Western-style dress and a kimono visualizes a modern Japanese world in transition during the Taishō/early Shōwa period, when imported styles and established cultural forms coexisted in everyday life. The contrast is gentle, not polemical as the two girls are companions, not opposites. Their shared book and downward gazes suggest learning, memory, and interior life, while the shoreline acts as a threshold space between land and sea, tradition and modernity, or possibly childhood and adulthood. The flowers and soft light add tenderness, but the steamship and sails subtly anchor the scene in a changing world. Little is known about the Japanese artist 香風 (romanized to Kafü or Kafū), but their signature …and ability to share a wonderfully beautiful youthful moment on silk … is clear.

“海辺の二少女 (Two Girls by the Sea)” by 香風 / Kafū (Japanese) - Ink and color on silk / c. 1920s - Honolulu Museum of Art (Honolulu, Hawaii) #WomenInArt #香風 #Kafu #HonoluluMuseumOfArt #Nihonga #TaishoArt #BeachArt #art #artText #arte #BlueskyArt #bskyart #JapaneseArt #JapaneseArtist #日本画 #美人画 #HoMA #1920s

The sitter is Harrieta Keōpūolani Nāhiʻenaʻena, an aliʻi of the House of Kamehameha and the sister of Kamehameha III (Kauikeaouli). Painted in 1825 by British artist Robert Dampier, the portrait balances Western oil-portrait conventions (modeled face, atmospheric distance, framed “view”) with Hawaiian symbols of sovereignty. The ʻahuʻula and kāhili are not decorative props. Instead, they are declarations of genealogy and chiefly authority, and place her within sacred protocol. She is a young Kānaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian) girl standing, facing left while meeting us with a steady, composed gaze. Her skin is warm medium-brown and her features are softly modeled, with dark eyes and closed lips. Her hair is dark and thick, gathered high with a narrow red band and falling in loose curls. She wears an ʻahuʻula (feather cape) in vivid blocks of red and golden yellow, arranged in angular shapes and edged with a deep black border. In both hands she holds a kāhili, the royal standard (a slender staff angled upward, topped with a full plume of pale, tawny feathers that flare like a soft fan). Behind her, the right side of the canvas is dense with shadowed greenery. To the left, the landscape opens to a low coastal plain with scattered palms, small thatched structures, and a wide band of ocean under a gray-blue sky streaked with faint pink clouds. The contrast of bright regalia against a subdued horizon keeps attention on her presence: a girl presented with the dignity and visual language of chiefly rank. Her direct, unsentimental gaze can feel quietly resistant because she is rendered for non-Hawaiian viewers, yet the featherwork insists on an Indigenous center of power. Seen against the coastal horizon with land, sea, and arriving ships, she becomes a reminder that the kingdom’s future was being negotiated in real time. Youth and rule coexist in this portrait via a girl holding the emblems of state as both an individual and a living continuation of her people.

"Nāhiʻenaʻena" (Sister of Kamehameha III) by Robert Dampier (British) - Oil on canvas / 1825 - Honolulu Museum of Art (Hawaii) #WomenInArt #RobertDampier #Dampier #HonoluluMuseumofArt #art #BlueskyArt #HawaiianRoyalty #KānakaMaoli #BritishArtist #BritishArt #HawaiianArt #PortraitofaGirl #artText

Tennent stages a pointed conversation with Édouard Manet’s Olympia … not by copying it exactly, but by aligning ts charged geometry in Hawaiʻi and changing what power looks like. Here, a reclining figure is clothed and self-possessed. The emphasis shifts from spectacle to presence. A young woman with medium-brown skin reclines across pale bedding, her body angled diagonally so her shoulder and hip form a long, quiet line. She wears a simple sleeveless white slip that catches soft green and lavender shadows with the paint laid in broad, chalky strokes that leave the weave of the surface faintly present. Her dark hair is gathered up, and she turns her face toward us with a steady, assessing gaze that is calm, unflinching, and slightly weary, as if she has been interrupted mid-thought. At the right edge, a second figure is cropped at the torso showing a warm, earth-toned shoulder and arm, and hands lifting a bright blue-and-white floral bundle hovering near the reclining woman’s body. The cropped attendant at the margin recalls Manet’s scene of display while also inviting Hawaiʻi-specific symbolism for hospitality, gifting, adornment, and the complicated economies that shaped how island bodies were looked at and marketed. Painted in the late 1920s, when Tennent was re-committing herself to figure painting after years of portrait commissions, the work shows her testing how European modernism could be reworked to center an island subject. Her thick hatch-like marks and palette-knife passages don’t prettify skin; instead, they build weight, heat, and motion, insisting that this woman is not a decorative “type” but a person with interiority. As critic John Charlot put it, Tennent pursued a beauty made of “imposing mass with grace … power with finesse, of form with flow.” In “Olympia of Hawaii,” that ideal becomes an ethics of looking as the gaze is returned, the body is dignified, and the old template is turned … still recognizable, but no longer under control.

“Olympia of Hawaii (with Apologies to Manet)” by Madge Tennent (British American) - Oil on canvas / c. 1927 - Honolulu Museum of Art (Hawaii) #WomenInArt #WomensArt #WomanArtist #WomenArtists #MadgeTennent #Tennent #HonoluluMuseumofArt #art #artText #BlueskyArt #arte #HawaiianArt #WomenPaintingWomen

A “modern” Japanese woman is depicted seated in a rocking chair, dressed in a black jacket with a white fur collar, light grey skirt, and trendy beige Mary Jane shoes. In Japan, modern girls モダンガール (modan gāru), frequently shortened to モガ (moga) were Japanese women who followed Westernized fashions and lifestyles in the 1920s. These “moga” were Japan's equivalent of America's flappers, India's kallege ladki, Germany's neue Frauen, France's garçonnes, or China's 摩登小姐 (modeng xiaojie). The period of Japanese history was characterized by the emergence of working class young women with access to money and consumer goods. Modern girls were depicted as living in the cities, being financially and emotionally independent and choosing their own suitors. In this piece, the woman is positioned centrally within the image, seated indoors in a rocking chair. The chair, with its woven cane back and wooden frame, is a prominent feature. The background includes a light beige Japanese screen, creating a simple backdrop. Her elegant features, contemplative or relaxed pose, and modern 1920s-1930s attire make this beautiful portrait timeless while clearly from a specific time and period of Japan.

T 夫人 (Mrs. T) by 和田青華 Wada Seika (Japanese) - Painted screen with ink and color on paper / 1932 - Honolulu Museum of Art (Hawaii) #womeninart #art #japaneseart #fineart #artwork #honolulumuseumofart #homa #wadaseika #和田青華 #モダンガール #モガ #moga #screenart #womensart #moderngirl #moga #美人画 #garçonne #屏風

This two-panel screen by Nihonga artist Nakamura Daizaburō features film star Takako Irie oozing sophistication wearing a fire-red kimono while reclining on a “modern” European-style chaise lounge. Takako Irie (入江 たか子 aka Irie Takako) was a Japanese movie actress born in Tokyo into the aristocratic Higashibōjō family. She became a major star, even starting her own production company, Irie Productions, in 1932. One of Kenji Mizoguchi's silent film masterpieces, The Water Magician, was produced at that company with Irie starring. She appeared in many advertisements, as well as on fans and other commercial goods. This folding screen painting appeared in the 1930 Teiten Imperial Exhibition by the Imperial Academy of Arts (forerunner of the Japan Art Academy). Nakamura Daizaburō 中村大三郎 was a Japanese painter active during the Taishō and Shōwa eras. He was born in Kyoto, the eldest son of a kimono dyer. He studied at the Kyoto Municipal School of Fine Arts and Crafts from 1912 to 1916. He then entered the Kyoto Municipal School of Painting, where he studied under Nishiyama Suisho, and was appointed to the faculty in 1925.

Takako Irie on Couch by 中村大三郎 (Nakamura Daizaburō - Japanese) - Color and gold on silk / c. 1930 - Honolulu Museum of Art (Hawaii) #womeninart #takakoirie #actress #art #silk #artwork #中村大三郎 #HonoluluMuseumofArt #womensart #入江たか子 #screenart #japaneseart #womanart #女性 #fineart #帝展 #japanese #日本画

Two Japanese women are on the beach under a pair of trees. One woman is lounging on a wooden beach chair wearing a yellow scarf with red lines on hear head plus a 1920s swimsuit and heeled open-toe sandals. The other woman is standing on the beach wearing a full length dark blue kimono with white seagulls and waves plus a large raffia hat with large pulled down with both her arms to shade the sun. On the background small groups of beach goers play at the waters edge.

海水浴の図 (Scene of Swimming in the Ocean) by 不二木阿古 (Fujiki Ako, Japanese) - Ink and color on silk / c. 1930 - Honolulu Museum of Art (Hawaii) #womeninart #japaneseart #fineart #HonoluluMuseumofArt #不二木阿古 #art #womensart #artwork #beachart #kimono #painting #womanart #silkart #swimming #ocean #bskyart

A women in pink kimono with orange and red dotted patterns with yellow and red obi sits on a wooden bench with a flower patterned cushion. She holds a blue fan in her right hand on her lap with casual indoor green slippers on her feet. In front of her is a wood table with a vase filled with blue Chinese bellflowers.

Table with Chinese Bellflowers by Kajiwara Hisako 梶原緋佐子 (Japanese) - Ink and color on silk / 1935 - Honolulu Museum of Art (Hawaii) #womeninart #artwork #japaneseart #fineart #art #womensart #painting #japaneseartist #honolulumuseumofart #womanart #bskyart #bsky.art #artoftheday

Sometimes called the Mona Lisa of Hawaii, this oil painting from 1901 by Theodore Wores is the most popular art piece at the Honolulu Museum of Art. In this stylized portrait of model Lizzie Victor portrayed as a Polynesian girl sitting on a floor creating a floral Lei while wearing a long red dress and floral headpiece. The artist’s soft romanticism of the subject reflects the more benign image of “Old Hawaii” that is still propagated by tourist brochures today even though the lei is from ancient Polynesian traditions and can have deep emotional, cultural and spiritual significance.

The Lei Maker by Theodore Wores (American) - Oil on canvas / 1901 - Honolulu (Hawaii) Museum of Art #womeninart #portrait #theodorewores #art #oilpainting #hawaiian #wores #painting #HonoluluMuseumofArt #americanartist #womensart #womanart #bskyart #lei #fineart #beauty #hawaiianvacation #artwork