BORN: 1753 (birthplace as Kyoto, Osaka, Yoshiwara in Edo (modern Tokyo), or Kawagoe in Musashi Province (modern Saitama Prefecture); none of these places has been verified)
DIED: 1806 (Records give Utamaro's death date as the 20th day of the 9th month of the year Bunka, which equates to 31 October 1806)
PERIOD: Edo (1615-1868)
WORKS: Ten Facial Types of Women, Love Poems, Flourishing Beauties of the Present Day, The Mirror of Flirting Lovers, Twelve Hours of the Green Houses, and Elegant Amusements of the Four Seasons, these prints show the life of the courtesans and teahouse waitresses of Yoshiwara, the amusement district of Edo. Also Poem of the Pillow, a album of 12 shunga images and not only his talent in portraying beautiful women but also animals and natural world icluding his books on insects in "Picture Book of Selected Insects and Crazy Poems" and shells in "Presents of the Ebb-Tide", 1790. "The Fantastic Travels of a Playboy in the Land of Giants" a kibyōshi picture book created in collaboration with his friend Shimizu Enjū, a writer.
While Utamaro's subjects by and large were taken from the general repertoire of the Ukiyo-e school, it was in the style and design of his prints that he surpassed his contemporaries and followers. His use of line and color and his feeling for pattern and composition reveal a master who produced some of the finest wood blocks ever made. However, his late work shows a certain decadence and overrefinement, a tendency further accentuated in the work of his followers; yet at the height of his power he was one of the greatest of Japanese artists, and it is not pure chance that the French impressionists, notably Édouard Manet, Edgar Degas, and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, were great admirers of his work.
Utamaro was the most prominent of the group of artists at the time that offended the authorities by identifying the historical figures by name and with their identifying crests and other symbols in his paintings, which was prohibited, and by depicting the 16th-century shogun Toyotomi Hideyoshi with prostitutes of the pleasure quarters, his career came to an end when he was arrested in 1804 for representing Hideyoshi in a disrespectful manner. Although his imprisonment was brief, he never recovered from this blow, and he died two years later.
Censored - Taiko gosai rakuto yukan no zu 太閤五妻洛東遊観之図 (Picture of Hideyoshi and his Five Wives Viewing the Cherry-blossom at Higashiyama)
Censored - Katō Kiyomasa at a party with Korean dancers
Examples of other works,
Ohisa of the Takashima Teashop - in this image Osen of the Kagiya is giving a Scroll to Ohisa
Shunga illustration from "Poem of the Pillow"
Utamaro's Fukaku Shinobu Koi (c. 1793–94) set an auction record of €745000 in 2016.
A good introduction to the artist is provided on the akantiek website showing images from insects and shells, I have printed below for ease;
An
Introduction to the famous Ukiyo-e Master Kitagawsea Utamaro.
Utamaro
was born in 1753 but his place of birth is unknown. He was a pupil of
Toriyama Sekien (1731-1788), an artist of the Kano school, who later
designed popular books usually with ghosts as a subject.Utamaro
started making designs for kiboyoshi and theatre books, the
first dated one in 1775, signing them Kitagawa Toyoaki.
> Tsutaya Jusaburo (1750-1797)
Apparently
he took the name Kitagawa because it was the family name of the
influential publisher Tsutaya Jusaburo in whose house Utamaro lived
for some time until Tsutaya Jusaburo’s death in 1797. While there
he must have been in close contact with Kitao Masanobu, who also
lived there as one of the publisher’s protégés. One can see the
influence of this younger but more precocious artist in Utamaro’s
work of the early 1780s, followed by the influence of Kiyonaga, who
dominated ukiyo-e design when Masanobu gave up print design in
preference for the writing of fiction.
His
Superb Insect Book.
Perhaps Utamaro found his independence as an artist in designing his > 'Picture Book of Selected Insects and Crazy Poems’
(1788, no.85), a masterwork both in composition and in minute observation of nature. The next year more books and albums by Utamaro were published by Tsutaya which suggest, together with their many reprintings, that they were enthusiastically received by the critical Edo public. These albums show that Utamaro was not only ´le peintre des maison vertes´ (painter of the ´Green Houses´ i.e. the brothels), Goncourt´s epithet which has tended to give Utamaro a one-sided reputation, but an artist equally accomplished at drawing a landscape, in which figures play only a minor role, and at penetrating the style of the earlier Kano and Tosa masters.
The ‘Picture Book of Selected Insects with Crazy Poems’, c.1788.
Poem
of the Pillow (Utamakura)
Utamaro’s great breakthrough came
in the same year (1788) his excellent ‘Insect book’ was published
with Poem of the Pillow. This set of twelve oban prints
featuring shunga designs evinces a maturity in style and is distinct
from any work by his contemporaries. The following quotes on Poem
of the Pillow are from the book Japanese Erotic Fantasies:
“...
One of the most remarkable achievements in Japanese
Ukiyo-e printmaking, Poem of the Pillow is attributed to
Utamaro based on the stylistic similarities to the artist’s other
work and a line in the preface that states that the title ‘comes
close to the name of the artist’. The publisher is Tsutaya Juzaburo
as indicated by the ivy-leaf crest, on several designs, that was his
publisher’s mark.
Utamaro was clearly a talented artist,
who benifited from a relationship with Tsutaya which started 6 or 7
years before, however, his prints up until 1788 did not surpass those
by artists like Katsukawa Shuncho (act. 1780s-early 1800s) or Torii
Kiyonaga (1752-1815). If one were to search for a percusor to the
Poem of the Pillow perhaps it is Kiyonaga’s The Sleeve
Scroll of some three years earlier (1785), which is analogous in
the strength of design. The year 1788, therefore, might be seen as a
watershed in Utamaro’s career and Poem of the Pillow his
first ‘masterpiece’. The twelve oban designs in Poem of
the Pillow do not exhibit any great sense of unity: it is
diverse stylistically and the mood differs greatly with each image.
Undoubtedly the most frequently reproduced of all shunga
images is his one, which is the tenth sheet (see picture below!) in
the set. It illustrates lovers in a private room in a teahouse.
Elegant, flowing lines define the kimono, the high quality printing
imbues the textiles with a transparency, and a sense of tenderness
between the couple is created by the woman’s hand as she directs
her lover towards her. The kyoka poem on the work is by Yadoya
(no) Meshimori (Rokujuen/Ishikawa Masamochi,
1752-1830)...
[...] (p.130 in Japanese Erotic Fantasies
by C. Uhlenbeck and M. Winkel)
|
Poem
of the Pillow, 1788, tenth sheet.
|
Shell
Book.
Utamaro
undoubtedly reached his apex in book design with the ´Presents of
the Ebb-tide’ (1790), an album in which the simplest of subjects –
shells – was treated with the utmost refinement. The charm of these
albums depends greatly upon the skills of the printer and in the
‘Shell book’ we find every subtlety a Japanese printer could
master employed with great dexterity: metal, dust, mica,
blind-printing and the shading of the colours.
Gold
Dust.
Shortly
after 1790 Utamaro began designing half-length portraits of women,
often against a mica background. The inspiration for this may have
stemmed from earlier ukiyo-e screens showing women against a flat
gold background. Generally speaking, there seems to have been a
tendency in these years, which already shows in Utamaro’s albums,
to look back and find inspiration in earlier artistic modes. During
this time Utamaro also drew many full-length portraits of courtesans
and teahouse girls in which the figures become more and more
elongated. The culmination of this – often deplored – tendency is
to be found in the ‘Twelve hours of the clock’, a series
depicting various occupations of the courtesans. In these series not
a mica but a plain yellow background was sprinkled with gold dust.
The use of these materials obviously made these materials obviously
made these prints more expensive than the usual ones and in later
editions the mica and gold dust have been omitted. It has been
suggested that luxurious editions like these were commisioned
privately, like surimono.
 |
From
the series: Twelve Hours of the Green Houses, c.1790s
|
Repetitiousness.
Even
more noteworthy than the mannerism in drawing these elongated
figures, which was a fashion followed by most artists in these years,
are Utamaro’s many experiments in drawing and composition. The
skillful use of figures seen from the back, the off-centre placing of
figures, the unexpected view of a face in a mirror or through a
transparent cloth or net, rids Utamaro’s work of the
repetitiousness so often found with regard to other ukiyo-e artists.
Master
Or Pupil.
In
1797 Tsutaya Jusaburo died and it may not be far-fetched to think
this brought about a decline in Utamaro’s style. His compositions
in later years often seem coarse when compared with his earlier
prints. Perhaps we should not ascribe these prints to Utamaro at all.
We know that his pupil Baigado Utamaro II signed his work in the same
way as Utamaro and it would not be an uncommon phenomenon in Japanese
art if much of the work produced in the master’s last year was in
fact designed by his pupil. Because of a lack of convincing data
their attribution to the master or the pupil is a matter of personal
taste. However, we have one work dated shortly before Utamaro’s
death in 1806, which displays Utamaro’s inventiveness and mastery
of composition as unimpaired, even if it was designed with the aid of
his pupils. This is the ‘Annals of the Green Houses’ in which
Utamaro depicts the daily activities and special festivities of the
Yoshiwara for the very last time.
Censorship
In 1804, Utamaro was accused of breaching censorship laws with
the publication of a politically sensitive triptych illustrating
Toyotomi Hideyoshi (1536-1598), the last military ruler of Japan
before the establishment of the Tokugawa shogunate. In early summer
of that year, Utamaro was convicted and given a sentence, along with
several of his colleagues, including Utagawa Toyokuni I (1769-1825),
of fifty days in mannacles under house arrest. He died two years
later in 1806.
> Click here for print designs by Kitagawa Utamaro.
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