Shunga Print - Utagawa Kunisada

Utagawa Kunisada Collection

Utagawa Kunisada (歌川国貞) / Toyokuni III (三代豊国)

Couple having sex in a boat

In Praise of Love in the Four Seasons
(Shunka shūtō, Shiki no nagame - 春夏秋冬 - 色の詠)

 In the back of a boat (car), transport of the time

Koikawa Shozan -- Ehon The Island Of Women

Koikawa Shozan Collection

The Island Of Women 

c.1860 - Meiji Period

This scenes are inspired by Utagawa Kunimaro's 1850s shunga Ehon 3 volume series 'Nyogo no Shima (Takara) Irifune' (The Island of Women and the Treasure Ship). The designs are characterized by their western 'presences', like those of the sailing vessels in the backgrounds.
The story is about three sailors who got on board at Shinaga, but their boat got shipwrecked and they drifted to an island inhabitated by exotic beauties.

Arrival at the Island of women

Inspection

Balded Headed Man

Climatic Moment

Exhausted Sailors - Insatiable Women

Giant Male Genitals 

On Top

Orgy

Western Influences Unusual Position

Foursome

Mirror - Narcissistic Lover

 

Utamaro - Kasen Koi no Bu

Kitagawa Utamaro Collection

Kasen Koi no Bu 

(歌撰恋之部, "Anthology of Poems: The Love Section")

ARTIST:  Kitagawa Utamaro (c. 1753–1806)
FORMAT: A series of five nishiki-e multicolour woodblock prints in ōban size, about 39 by 25 centimetres (15 in × 10 in) and have reproduced on 170gsm white A3 paper with approx 2cm border. The original backgrounds are dusted with glittering beni-kira, a dust made of lepidolite, a rose-coloured type of mica, used to emphasize the theme of love.
PUBLISHED BY:  Tsutaya Jūzaburō ca. 1793–94
NOTES:The series is on the theme of love, and each print was printed by Tsutaya Jūzaburō using luxrious techniques such as dusting the backgrounds with rose-coloured mica. In 2016 the print Fukaku Shinobu Koi set the record price for an ukiyo-e print sold at auction at €745000. Compared to Utamaro's similar earlier series "Fujin Sōgaku Jittai and Fujo Ninsō Juppin", the faces are much more close up, and the facial features and expressions more individuated and finely detailed. By focusing on the theme of love in Kasen Koi no Bu, Utamaro challenges himself to express the inner emotional states of his subjects. The prints in this series have garnered particularly favourable praise amongst Utamaro's large body of work.

Only one of the images provide us with a glimpse of flesh however Utamaro has still provided us with a set of sensual images with hints of erotisism due to the colours and printing techniques to bring out faces and expressions.

Mare ni Au Koi

The woman in Mare ni Au Koi (稀ニ逢恋, "love that rarely meets") appears quite young and sheltered; she is probably in her teens. She wears an ornate kushi-kanzashi comb-shaped hairpin and bashfully sticks her fingers just barely from the sleeve of her kimono. The title refers not to a woman who rarely meets her lover, but to a shy young woman inexperienced in love, and her expression is the most withdrawn in the series.

 

Mono-omoi Koi

The woman in Mono-omoi Koi (物思恋, "reflective love" or "anxious love") has her eyebrows shaved—sign of a married woman. She appears to be the eldest in the series—perhaps even middle-aged —and to come from an affluent background. She wears an elegant, subdued kimono with a pattern of plovers.
The woman rests her right cheek lightly on the back of her right hand and narrows her eyes in thought. In line with the theme of the series, she must be pondering love—perhaps an illegitimate lover or old memories of love. Some consider it the finest example from the series, and others suggest the picture pairs with Fukaku Shinobu Koi.

 

Fukaku Shinobu Koi

The woman in Fukaku Shinobu Koi (深く忍恋, "deeply hidden love") has blackened her teeth with ohaguro, which normally signifies a married woman, but she lacks the shaved eyebrows that would also signify her being married; she is perhaps yet young and recently married. Her ornate kanzashi hairpin has a flower design on it. She looks down and holds a kiseru tobacco pipe in her right hand. She stares off, her shoulders raised, eyes narrowed, and tiny lips pursed, as if in deep, emotional mid-sigh.
The title suggests the woman may be pondering a risky affair. Utamaro uses a limited number of colours in the print; the deep blacks of the protective collar around her kimono and her large, rounded hairstyle draws the attention, contrasting with the white of the woman's face and nape of her neck.
In 2016 Fukaku Shinobu Koi set the record price for an ukiyo-e print sold at auction at €745000.

 

Arawaruru Koi

 

Arawaruru Koi (あらはるる恋, "obvious love") presents the most openly sensual print in the series. The plump, sensual woman seems to care little that her kimono is open, exposing a breast. Her hairdo is in disarray, the kanzashi hairpin at the front about to fall off, and she holds one of the hairpins in her left hand. She appears to be looking down outside the frame of the print, perhaps in mid-conversation. The term arawaruru koi refers to a love so wholehearted that it expresses itself in the subject's face and mannerisms.

 

Yogoto ni Au Koi

 

The woman in Yogoto ni Au Koi (夜毎ニ逢恋, "love that meets each night") raises her eyes in delight as she holds a letter out from the breast pocket of her kimono. The title suggests it is from a lover, perhaps calling her to another of their nightly trysts. Utamaro gives his subject a noble air and features pays close attention to realistic details of her face, such as the shape of her eyebrows and loose hairs straggling about.

Shunga Series - Sex and Bathtubs Pt1

Ukiyo-e, which included both painting and printed illustration designs, was a unique genre of art that typically depicted the everyday life and culture of Japanese urban commoners, here we can see women bathung and men unable to restrain themsevles.

Inventing Utamaro: A Japanese Masterpiece Rediscovered (Freer/Sackler Museum)

EXHIBITION: Inventing Utamaro: A Japanese Masterpiece Rediscovered

 April 8, 2017–July 9, 2017
Arthur M. Sackler Gallery

The Smithsonian Institution has two museums of Asian art: the Freer Gallery of Art, which opened to the public in 1923, and the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, which welcomed its first visitors in 1987. Both are physically connected by an underground passageway and ideologically linked through the study, exhibition, and sheer love of Asian art.

In 2014, the Okada Museum of Art in Hakone, Japan, made an announcement that startled the art world. The new arts center revealed it had discovered a long-lost painting by Kitagawa Utamaro (1753–1806), a legendary but mysterious Japanese artist.
Titled Snow at Fukagawa, the immense work is one of three paintings by Utamaro that idealize famous pleasure districts in Edo (now Tokyo).

 Snow at Fukagawa 

198.8 by 341.1 centimetres (78.3 in × 134.3 in)

This trio reached the Paris art market in the late 1880s and was quickly dispersed. Museum founder Charles Lang Freer acquired Moon at Shinagawa in 1903. Cherry Blossoms at Yoshiwara passed through several hands in France until the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in Hartford, Connecticut, purchased it in the late 1950s. And Snow at Fukagawa had been missing for nearly seventy years before it resurfaced in Hakone.

Moon at Shinagawa 

147.4 by 321 centimetres (58 in × 126 in)

 

Cherry Blossoms at Yoshiwara 

186.7 by 256.9 centimetres (73.5 in × 101.1 in)

For the first time in nearly 140 years, these paintings reunite in Inventing Utamaro at the Freer|Sackler, the only location to show all three original pieces. Contextualizing them within collecting and connoisseurship at the turn of the twentieth century, the exhibition explores the many questions surrounding the paintings and Utamaro himself.

Wiki Page

Looking at how these places relate to modern day Tokyo.

A small section of the exhibition this year

 

Exhibition curators James Ulak and Julie Nelson Davis presenting the exhibits (8mins)

Inventing Utamaro: A Conversation with the Curators(67mins)

 

A enlightening presentation from Amy Stanley, professor of history at Northwestern University on the lives of women under the Shognate during this period - How did the sex trade transform communities in early modern Japan? Which social and economic forces shaped the lives of the women who worked in pleasure districts such as the Yoshiwara? Join Julie Nelson Davis, co-curator of Inventing Utamaro and Amy, to learn about the reality behind the elegant courtesans in Kitagawa Utamaro’s paintings.

 VIDEO: Beyond Images of Beauty: Women’s Lives in Edo-Period Japan

Amy Stanley is a historian specializing in early modern and modern Japan, with special interests in women's/gender history and global history. Her first book, Selling Women: Prostitution, Households, and the Market in Early Modern Japan, explores how an expanding market for sex transformed the Japanese economy and changed women’s lives between 1600 and 1868. Stanley has also written about adultery in the Edo period, education for geisha in the first years of the Meiji era, and the figure of the migrant maidservant in global history.

Map of Yoshiwara 1846

The Main Gate Yoshiwara early 1900s

David Bull - Woodblock Printmaker

This is a collection of the videos (15) shows us the patience and skill needed to  produce a new reproduction of Hokusai's iconic piece 'The Great Wave', it is being made in the Tokyo workshop of woodblock printmaker David Bull in the spring of 2015. 

The series shows us the process right from cenception to the finished article that David followed. It has been a joy to listen to and to watch. As a bonus on most video's we get a tour of the district around his shop so we can experience life in Tokyo.

PART1

  

PLAYLIST for remainng videos click the You Tube icon

David's You Tube Channel with many more great videos can be found here

David's business website here

Utamaro - Hokkoku Goshiki-zumi

Kitagawa Utamaro Collection

Hokkoku Goshiki-zumi 

(北国五色墨, "Five Shades of Ink in the Northern Quarter")

FORMAT: A series of five ukiyo-e prints designed by the Japanese artist Kitagawa Utamaro, ōban size which is approx. 39x25cm and reproduced on 170gsm white A3 paper with approx 2cm border.

PUBLISHED: ca.1794–95.

NOTES: The prints depict and contrast women who work in or near the exclusive pleasure district of Yoshiwara in the administrative capital of Edo (modern Tokyo). They range from the highest ranks—highly-trained and expensive geisha and oiran—to the lowest prostitutes outside the walls of Yoshiwara. Each is printed on a yellowish background and bears a different-coloured inkstick-shaped cartouche in the corner displaying the series name. The title alludes to and puns on the name of a haikai poetry anthology that appeared in 1731.

In order of rank (low to high);

Kashi - worked outside the walls of the pleasure district Yashiwara

 

 Teppō (てっぽう, "rifle") refers to another type of prostitute who worked outside the walls of Yoshiwara and charged exceptionally low rates.

 Kiri no Musume (切の娘, "short-term prostitute") was a sort of low-ranked prostitute who worked within the walls of the pleasure districts

 A Geigi (芸妓, another word for "geisha") was the highest-ranked worker in the pleasure districts.

Oiran (おいらん, "high-ranking courtesan") represents the highest-ranking type of prostitute in the pleasure districts.

Bijin-ga (美人画 - Ladies washing