Bijinga by Kitagawa Utamaro
This color printing, which was made with a woody plate and decorated with powdered mica, falls within the bijinga genre. The subjects are “present-day” (at the time of the author) beauties which are portrayed, as it will be later the case in photography, with the additional intent of stopping time they were born into. Each lady is represented by an idealized face and identified through some typical details, namely fans, clothing, appearance as if they were icons or goddesses. The intra-group threefold harmony offers a strong suggestion, almost a musical chord somehow evoking the western mythical figure of the Graces. However, we can feel some sort of tension between idealization and individualization, for which the slight diversity of the exceedingly stylized features is regarded as responsible. We can safely speak about “historical”, photographic portrait where great care is taken to furnish informative details as in the case of the refined yoko-hyogo hairstyles.
Utamaro developed the technique, largely adopted in the ukiyo-e, consisting in making the background bright with the use of powdered mica(kira-e), thus resulting in a high-contrasted subject in close-up. In the portrait under examination, the women’s fleshy opaque pink is increased by the opalescent background.
The portrayed female form is once more a historical figure. We’re looking at Hanaōgi IV, one of the highest rank courtesans in the Edo eve, from the teahouse (ōgi-ya) in Yoshiwara pleasure center. It was said that, maybe, she fled with her lover from that place right after the publication of the printing under examination. Feels like that woman isn’t watching, even though she is in turn aware of being watched by, the viewer. She is engaged in bracing, with fancy and nonchalant pose, the kanzashi, a sort of hairstyle adornment. The kimono is gracefully decorated by fans with tied ribbons. The draping outline is thicker and softer than that contouring the face and arms. The latter are so progressively rendered with a precise and delicate dynamism up to the fingers that the upshot is of rare expressiveness. Even the printing at hand can be categorized as a bijinga and incorporated into the ukiyo-e tradition. As such, the artwork was for a wide mass production, even though further samples given by the same duplicating machine are hard to find.
Limited information and different track records are available on the life of Kitagawa Utamaro, alias Kitagawa Ichitaro. According to some sources, he was born around the year 1753 in one the three main cities of Japan, and that was Edo (today’s Tokio), Kyoto or Osaka, otherwise in a non well identified rural town. A different source indicates the entertainment district in Yoshiwara and owners of a teahouse as the author’s birthplace and parents, respectively.
Ever since he was a kid, Utamaro was introduced to painting by Master Toriyama Sekien (maybe, his father), which studied at Kanō classic school before approaching the ukiyo-e (image of the floating world) popular genre. The printings falling in this category were produced by printing plates made of wood, which was familiar in the Japanese cities from the 17th to the 19th century of the Edo period. The ukiyo-e genre was addressed to inhabitants of cities and reproduced scenes from daily urban life, especially those that were spent in the entertainment districts.
In 1804, thus to the top of his artistic success, Utamaro was involved in some legal proceedings owing to a number of printings depicting the military leader of the Momoyama period, Toyotomi Hideyoshi. Because the latter was hated by those in power at the time, Utamaro was convicted to a restriction of freedom (which would consist in prison or the obligation to stay in handcuffs for fifty days) which, according to some sources, would upset the artist’s sensibility and embittered the last period of his life.
He died in Edo on September 20th, 1806.
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