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.

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)

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.

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.