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Three Beauties of the Present Day
Three Beauties of the Present Day. Kitagawa Utamaro · Public domain · source

Kitagawa Utamaro

Public domain1753-1806·Japanese·painting·Wikipedia ↗

Who

Japanese ukiyo-e painter and print designer, born around 1753 as Kitagawa Ichitaro and dead in Edo in 1806. The publisher Tsutaya Juzaburo took him on around 1782, and he lived in Tsutaya's house for about five years while becoming the firm's principal artist.

Why they matter

He is the master of bijin-ga, pictures of beautiful women: close portraits of named celebrities of the day, a geisha and two teahouse waitresses in the Three Beauties, printed from a block per colour and dusted with mica so the background glitters. Europe learned ukiyo-e partly through him: Edmond de Goncourt's Outamaro of 1891 was the first monograph on the artist, and Monet, Degas and Toulouse-Lautrec collected his prints.

What to buy

Originals: Edo-period impressions do still come to market, so "original Utamaro" is a real category, but it is a specialist-dealer purchase. His earlier, most popular designs are hard to find in good condition, and copies have dogged him from the start: he sometimes signed "the genuine Utamaro" to separate himself from imitators. After Japan opened in the 1860s, European demand produced a wave of Meiji-era copies, many of them fine work that was never meant to deceive; but the Tokyo publisher Takamizawa Enji made both honest reproductions and deliberate fakes, "rejuvenating" worn old impressions by printing fresh colour over them on old paper. Treat any cheap "Edo original" as a copy until a dealer who puts their name to it says otherwise. The honest affordable tier is a twentieth-century or current hand-carved woodblock reproduction, sold as one: the Adachi Institute in Tokyo still cuts and prints them entirely by hand, and Fuji Arts lists woodblock reproductions of his designs. Prints: the Met, the Rijksmuseum and the Art Institute of Chicago publish their Utamaros as free, high-resolution open-access images, which beat anything a poster factory sells. Books: Asano Shugo and Timothy Clark's two-volume The Passionate Art of Kitagawa Utamaro (British Museum, 1995) is the standard catalogue, now out of print and found second-hand; Julie Nelson Davis's Utamaro and the Spectacle of Beauty is the readable modern monograph.

Notes

In 1804 he was punished for prints drawn from the Ehon Taikoki that showed the warlord Toyotomi Hideyoshi, named and wearing his crests, among courtesans: he was manacled for fifty days along with Toyokuni, Jippensha Ikku and others, and their publishers were heavily fined. He died two years later. Tsutaya, who published the insect book and the Three Beauties, had died in 1797, a loss said to have hurt the quality of Utamaro's later work. The Met holds the 1788 insect book, the MFA Boston an impression of the Three Beauties.

Story

Three of Utamaro's largest paintings, known together as Snow, Moon and Flowers, show the pleasure districts of Fukagawa, Shinagawa and the Yoshiwara. The oldest firm record of them is one day: 23 November 1879, when all three hung together at Joganji temple in Tochigi, north of Tokyo. They belonged to the local Zenno family, whose crest appears on garments in each picture. By the late 1880s they were in Paris, where the dealer Siegfried Bing tried to sell them to the British Museum. Instead they were dispersed. Charles Lang Freer bought the moon painting in 1903; the cherry blossoms went to the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford in 1957. Snow at Fukagawa was last shown in public at the Matsuzakaya department store in Tokyo in April 1948, and then disappeared for 66 years, until the new Okada Museum of Art in Hakone announced in 2014 that it had the painting. It has never said where the painting had been. Reuniting the set then ran into an older obstacle: Freer's will forbids lending any work in his collection, so the moon could not travel. The only place all three could hang side by side was Washington, and that is where they did, in the Sackler Gallery's Inventing Utamaro, from April to July 2017.

Key works

In museum collections

See the work

The Met ↗Rijksmuseum ↗Art Institute of Chicago ↗Ukiyo-e.org ↗Wikimedia Commons ↗

Prints

Fuji Arts (woodblock reproductions) ↗eBay ↗Amazon ↗

Books

AbeBooks (Asano and Clark, The Passionate Art of Kitagawa Utamaro) ↗Bookshop.org ↗Amazon ↗

Originals

Scholten Japanese Art ↗eBay ↗

See also

Katsushika Hokusai 1760-1849Utagawa Hiroshige 1797-1858Utagawa Kuniyoshi 1798-1861Suzuki Harunobu 1724-1770Yoshitoshi 1839-1892Utagawa Kunisada 1786-1865Keisai Eisen 1790-1848Francisco Goya 1746-1828

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