Kitagawa Utamaro
Master of beauties.
Kitagawa Utamaro made woodblock prints of women from the pleasure quarters and everyday life, often in half-length. He was imprisoned for a picture of the warlord Hideyoshi.
Kitagawa Utamaro was born around 1753, but both the year and place of his birth are uncertain. He grew up in Edo, present-day Tokyo, and was apprenticed to the painter Toriyama Sekien, who was known for his books on ghosts and supernatural beings. In the 1780s he began working with the publisher Tsutaya Jūzaburō, who proved decisive for his career. Tsutaya gave him lodging, commissions and access to the best woodblock carvers and printers in the city.
His first great successes were illustrated books, among them a book on insects from 1788 with very careful observations of nature. The real breakthrough came in the early 1790s, when he began making portraits of women in half-length or close-up, known as ōkubi-e. Previously, women in woodblock prints had usually been shown full-length and looked rather alike. Utamaro instead tried to capture personality, mood and the moment: a woman reading a letter, combing her hair or looking in a mirror. The series usually called Ten Classes of Women's Physiognomy, from around 1792–93, is among the best known. His prints are now in major collections, including the Tokyo National Museum, the British Museum in London and the Metropolitan Museum in New York.
Technically he was a master of fine lines and subtle colours. He often used mica backgrounds that gave the paper a shimmering surface, and he rendered the fine strands of hair and the patterns of fabrics with great precision. His women have long, narrow faces, small mouths and a calm elegance that became an ideal for an entire era. He also made erotic prints, shunga, as was common among the ukiyo-e artists of the time.
Utamaro worked at a time when the shogunate was trying to curb luxury and immorality. Censorship was tightened, and in 1804 he was punished for prints depicting the historical warlord Toyotomi Hideyoshi, a forbidden subject. According to the accounts he was made to wear manacles for fifty days. He died two years later, in 1806, and many believe the punishment broke him.
Utamaro was one of the first Japanese artists to become famous in Europe. During the Japonisme of the second half of the 19th century his prints were collected by artists and critics in Paris, and the French writer Edmond de Goncourt published a book about him in 1891. His way of cropping the image and focusing on women's everyday lives left its mark on the Impressionists and on artists such as Mary Cassatt.