This drawing came about when I was looking through some Meiji-era Japanese medical photographs. The poses of two women reminded me of
a favorite painting, Paul Gauguin's Tahitian Women with Mango Blossoms (1899), in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
I substituted the mango blossoms for a more typically Japanese flower,
the chrysanthemum. That flower symbolizes nobility and is the national and imperial crest of Japan.
