Works by Kitagawa Utamaro

Kitagawa Utamaro designed woodblock prints of women, including whole series on the women of the Yoshiwara district, and rose to fame in the early 1790s with half-length portraits of a single beauty.

His teacher, Toriyama Sekien, had trained in the Kanō school before turning to ukiyo-e. Probably from 1783 Utamaro lived for some five years with the publisher Tsutaya Jūzaburō, mostly illustrating books of comic verse. About 1791 he dropped book work for single women shown half-length, where others still favoured groups. Through the 1790s his figures grew slimmer, with long faces and small features, and he tried out line, colour and printing methods to set each woman's face and mood apart.

Women fill most of the prints below, and most date from the 1790s. Hanaōgi of the Gomeirō fills the sheet with Hanaōgi's head and shoulders, her eyes lowered to the robe in her hands. In Woman Holding a Tortoise-shell Hair-comb the comb covers her mouth, yet her nose and lips show through it as if the shell were clear. In Geisha and Attendant on a Rainy Night the rain is a screen of fine diagonal lines behind the two women.

Scenes of a woman and child at home recur in his work; in one, a woman leans over a sleeping child whose nightmare of ghosts floats overhead in a cloud. Among his rare paintings, Moonlight Revelry at Dozo Sagami opens a Shinagawa pleasure house onto the sea, its rooms in European perspective but seen from high above, as in Japanese painting. In 1804 he was arrested over prints of the warlord Toyotomi Hideyoshi; he died two years later.

Sources: Wikipedia, Smithsonian Institution, Art Institute of Chicago, The Metropolitan Museum of Art.