gurdymonkey | A brown study, or am I really this insane?

From the moment I first saw this portrait of Tosenin in Money L. Hickman's Japan's Golden Age: Momoyama, I loved it. I acquired some brown dupioni awhile back, got embroiled in other things, put it away, forgot I had it and recently found it again after a major closet cleaning binge.

The image in the book unfortunately isn't very large, but I put it through my scanner and took a look at it via my photo editing software. It's grainy, but oh, my freakin' Lord and Creator, will you look at this? The lozenges are all patterned! I'm not 100% sure, but I think the flowers are clematis based on a design I found in another one of my textile books. They're autumn bloomers and that would certainly fit the color scheme and mood of the portrait.

Those white lines dropping diagonally toward her left arm show the lozenge and flower pattern crossing seam lines of the overlap panel and collar from the body panel. In other words, Oh My Children, this project will require partial assembly before painting commences, assuming I'm crazy enough to try. I think this one is going to require a combination of stencil and free hand work.

EDIT in response to comments by

kass_rants:

"Colophon dated 1610
Hanging scroll; ink and colors on silk
81.7 x 34.8 cm
Daizenji, Kyoto
(That's why I haven't been able to find very much about this portrait anywhere - it's in a collection belonging to the Daizenji temple.)

".....The dark colors and small, complex patterns of her garments exemplify the luxurious textiles current in the Keicho era (1596-1615). Their sumptuous elegance suggests a sensitivity to fashion that conflicts with the image of piety conveyed by the string of beads in her hand.....
"...it has been surmised that the woman represented here is one of Matsu no Marudono's younger sisters, possibly the wife of Ujie no Naizen Yukihiro, who fought against Ieyasu in the Battle of Sekigahara and was forced to commit suicide after the Battle of Osaka." There is also a reference to Tosenin's religious name Shunko, so that tells us she became a nun at some point.

OK, there's nothing conclusive that nails down whether brown is brown in this portrait except that the essayist describes her garments as "dark".

However, even with 500 years of age and fading, the reproduction in the book registers greens as greens, reds as a dark brick red and so forth. Look at the detail above - you can see her obi is red and gold and it's a very different color from the kosode it's wrapped around. You can even see that the leaves of those flowers are green. It's a little hard to see in the larger portrait shot above, but there's a slash of red at her collar line too.

The same volume contains several other female portraits from the same period, in which reds are visibly red. There are male portraits in kosode and kataginu that are registering as brown and I can't help thinking that the reaction would have been, well, of course, they're men and they're being all Zen, of course, they'd be wearing brown. While I can't prove it one way or the other, my gut feeling is that her kosode was and is brown.

(The book was the companion to an exhibition of Momoyama art and artifacts in the 1990s under the aegis of the Agency of Cultural Affairs of Japan and the Dallas Museum of Art. Japan's Golden Age: Momoyama, edited by Money L. Hickman. The chapter on portraiture was written by art historian Christine Guth.)