Kitagawa Utamaro: The First Portraitist of Ordinary Women
Around 1792 a print appeared in Edo showing three young women in a shallow triangle against a ground dusted with mica, so that the paper itself glimmered. They were not goddesses or actors: a shamisen-playing geisha and two teahouse waitresses, teenagers, the daughters of a teahouse keeper and a rice-cake seller. *Three Beauties of the Present Day* treated them as individuals worth the expense of a luxury print, and it restored the fortunes of a publisher the censors had recently ruined.
An Uncertain Beginning
Almost nothing about his origins is fixed. He was born around 1753 as Kitagawa Ichitarō, later using the names Yūsuke and Yūki. His birthplace is unknown, and so are his parents; scholars have variously guessed that his father kept a teahouse or that he was the artist Toriyama Sekien himself. Sekien — respected, known for pictures of ghosts and the supernatural — is thought to have been his only teacher, and described his pupil as talented, devoted and intelligent. Utamaro's earliest known work is an illustration of an eggplant in a poetry anthology of 1770. He began publishing under the name Kitagawa Toyoaki in the 1770s.
Tsutaya
The decisive relationship of his life was commercial. From about 1782–83 he worked with the publisher Tsutaya Jūzaburō, the sharpest operator in the Edo print trade, who had already commissioned him in 1781 to illustrate a *kibyōshi*, one of the cheap illustrated novellas of the day. Tsutaya put him to work on ambitious, expensive projects: the *Picture Book of Selected Insects* of 1788, one of seven *kyōka* poetry books he issued, in which Utamaro drew beetles, dragonflies and grasshoppers with an entomologist's exactitude and a poet's placement. Publisher and artist made each other. Tsutaya's death in 1797 removed the man who had commissioned Utamaro's best work.
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In the 1790s Utamaro made the move that changed his medium. Where his contemporaries composed groups of full-length figures, he pulled in close, producing *bijin ōkubi-e* — half-length or head-and-shoulders portraits of women, faces enlarged and features refined to the edge of exaggeration. On a print the size of a sheet of writing paper, this is the difference between a fashion plate and a portrait.
The subject matter went with it. He drew what happened behind the scenes in the licensed brothels, the theatres and the teahouses of Edo: courtesans, entertainers, waitresses and ordinary working women, caught in the middle of small unheroic actions. And he individualised them.
*Three Beauties of the Present Day*, made around 1792–93 in the Kansei era, is the demonstration piece. It is a *nishiki-e*, a full-colour print built from multiple blocks laid one over another, its background dusted with muscovite for a glimmering ground. The three sitters are named women: Tomimoto Toyohina, a shamisen-playing geisha of the Tamamuraya house in the Yoshiwara, at the centre; Naniwaya Kita, about fifteen, daughter of an Asakusa teahouse keeper, at the right; Takashima Hisa, about sixteen, daughter of a Ryōgoku rice-cake seller, at the left. Each carries an identifying family crest — primrose, paulownia, oak. The faces obey a shared ideal of beauty, and yet Kita has plump cheeks, almond eyes and an innocent look while Hisa has rounder eyes and a stiffer, prouder expression. That degree of differentiation had not existed in the genre. He also produced *shunga*, the erotic "spring pictures" of the Edo period, at the highest level the form reached.
The Manacles
In 1804 he made prints showing the sixteenth-century warlord Toyotomi Hideyoshi in lustful company with his concubines. Depicting real historical rulers was prohibited, and the state responded: Utamaro and other artists were manacled for fifty days, and their publishers were heavily fined. He was about fifty-one. Commentators have generally held that his work never again reached its earlier level, and it is widely believed the punishment broke his health. He died in 1806.
Why Utamaro Is Called a Genius
The specific faculty was psychological observation applied to a mass-market commercial format that had never asked for it. Before him, the *bijin* print was a template — a beauty was an arrangement of conventional signs, interchangeable from sheet to sheet. Utamaro kept the conventions, which were commercially non-negotiable, and smuggled individuality in underneath them: a slight difference in the curve of an eye, the set of a mouth, the tilt of a neck, enough to make one named woman distinguishable from another while both remained recognisably "beautiful" in the required way. Doing that within a rigid formal grammar is harder than abandoning the grammar. He is routinely placed among the half-dozen greatest ukiyo-e artists, and his standing was national in his own lifetime, which was rare.
The counter-case has three parts, and it is not weak. The first is the same authorship problem that attaches to every ukiyo-e artist: he designed, but block-carvers cut and printers printed, and the mica ground of *Three Beauties* — the thing that makes it luxurious — was a press effect and a publisher's expenditure. The second is volume and the studio: more than two thousand prints carry his name, quality varies enormously, and pupils and imitators worked in his manner during and after his life, so that "an Utamaro" is a looser category than a signature suggests. The third is the subject itself. His women are the workforce of the pleasure quarters, drawn for male buyers, and the tenderness of his attention does not cancel the fact that these prints were part of the marketing apparatus of the brothel district. He humanised his subjects within a system that commodified them, which is a real achievement and a genuine complicity at the same time.
Legacy
When Japanese prints reached France after the country reopened, Utamaro's went with them and became a pivotal force in the rise of Japonisme. Baudelaire, Monet and Toulouse-Lautrec were among those who admired and collected the work — and the debt is legible in Lautrec's flattened, cropped, boldly outlined women of Montmartre, who are the direct descendants of Utamaro's women of the Yoshiwara. He died poor and out of favour, two years after being chained by the state for drawing a dead warlord's love life. A century later he had become one of the instruments by which European painting learned to stop modelling in the round and start composing in flat, decisive shapes.
Achievements
- Notable work: Moonlight Revelry at Dozo Sagami
- Notable work: Three Beauties of the Present Day
- Movement: ukiyo-e
