Age of Revolution
Kitagawa Utamaro (1753–1806)
Japanese Ukiyo-e printmaker.
Kitagawa Utamaro (born c. 1753, died 1806) was the supreme designer of bijin-ga, the ukiyo-e 'pictures of beautiful women', working in Edo at the height of the closed-country Tokugawa peace. Little is certain about his early life, but from the late 1780s his partnership with the ambitious publisher Tsutaya Jūzaburō made him the most sought-after portraitist of the Yoshiwara pleasure quarter and the teahouses of the city.
Utamaro's innovation was psychological as much as formal. Where earlier artists drew beauties as full-length types, he pioneered the ōkubi-e, the large-headed half-length 'big head' portrait, often set against a shimmering ground of mica, so that a tilt of the neck, a glance, or a hand raised to the lips could carry an individual mood. In series such as 'Ten Types in the Physiognomic Study of Women' he borrowed the language of physiognomy to distinguish temperament and social station, and he was equally celebrated for tender studies of mothers with their children and for the frank eroticism of shunga albums like 'Utamakura'.
His fortunes turned in 1804, when prints depicting the sixteenth-century warlord Toyotomi Hideyoshi with his wife and concubines fell foul of shogunal censorship; he was arrested and sentenced to be manacled for fifty days, an ordeal from which, by many accounts, he never fully recovered before his death in 1806. A century later his line and flat pattern astonished Europe: Edmond de Goncourt devoted a whole monograph to him, and Mary Cassatt built a suite of colour prints in direct answer to his compositions.
The words the record keeps using: elegant, sensuous, intimate, refined, observant, graceful, worldly.
At a glance
- Lived 1753–1806
- Origin Japanese
- Worked in Edo (Tokyo)
- Era Age of Revolution
- Movements Ukiyo-e
- Mediums Polychrome woodblock print
- Techniques Keyblock and color-block printing, Bokashi gradation
Works in the archive
- Utamakura (Poem of the Pillow) — preface page, 1788 (British Museum (album impressions))
The preface leaf of 'Utamakura', the twelve-sheet shunga album Utamaro made with Tsutaya Jūzaburō in 1788 — widely regarded as the finest erotic album in the ukiyo-e tradition. This decorated opening page, with its… - Young Woman Blowing a Poppin (from Ten Types in the Physiognomic Study of Women), 1792 (Public-domain impression (ex Flickr / trialsanderrors))
A young woman in a checked kimono raises a poppin — a fragile blown-glass toy that pops as the breath is drawn in and out — to her lips, her attention wholly absorbed in the small game. One of Utamaro's most beloved… - Three Beauties of the Present Day (Tōji san bijin), 1793 (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston)
Three celebrated real women of the day — the geisha Tomimoto Toyohina and the teahouse waitresses Naniwaya Kita and Takashima Hisa — arranged as a triangular bust group against a glittering mica ground. Their tiny… - Awabi-tori (Abalone Divers), 1797 (Public-domain impression of the triptych)
A triptych of ama, the women who dived for abalone off the coast, shown at the shore between dives with their children among them. Utamaro turns the labour of working women into a frieze of long, flowing bodies and…
What was said
Scholarship reads Utamaro's series such as 'Ten Types in the Physiognomic Study of Women' as an attempt to individuate his subjects — to render the particular temperament, mood, and social type of a woman through expression and gesture — an ambition realised in his invention of the close-cropped ōkubi-e bust portrait.
In 1804 Utamaro published prints depicting the sixteenth-century warlord Toyotomi Hideyoshi with his wife and concubines, drawn from the popular 'Ehon Taikōki'; the shogunate judged this an illegal representation of a ruler and sentenced the artist to be manacled (handcuffed) for fifty days, a punishment from which, by many accounts, he did not fully recover.
Edmond de Goncourt devoted a whole monograph, 'Outamaro, le peintre des maisons vertes', to the artist, celebrating him as the great painter of the women of the pleasure quarters and helping fix his high reputation in Europe.
Lineage
Passed on to Mary Cassatt, Claude Monet
What would Utamaro make of your idea?
The Artiquity Studio makes a new picture in this hand's manner from a few words or a photograph — grounded in the technique, palette and subjects recorded above, and always credited "after Kitagawa Utamaro", never passed off as a found work. Open the Studio with Utamaro · Keep a life moment the way Utamaro would · Pictures made after Utamaro