A dark-haired young woman hovers with great outspread wings, her eyes lowered. Over a pink kimono she wears a long blue-green robe that dissolves into a cascade of peacock feathers that trail almost to the foot of the picture. The artist's signature is at lower right. Warwick Goble painted it as the frontispiece of Green Willow and Other Japanese Fairy Tales by Grace James, published by Macmillan in London in 1910 with forty of his color plates.

It belongs to the tale "The Moon Maiden": an old bamboo cutter finds a tiny fairy inside a shining green jewel, and she grows into the Lady Beaming Bright, who turns away every suitor, even the Mikado. On a night of full moon, heavenly beings bring her a feather robe, and she spreads her wings and returns to her father, the King of the Moon. Grace James gathered the tales from many sources, some from the Ko-ji-ki, Japan's Record of Ancient Matters, and others remembered from childhood. The story ends with the Mikado burning the elixir of life she left him on the highest mountain, so that its vapor might carry his message to her.

Our copy is the 1910 edition. It is in the New York Public Library in New York.