Kitagawa Utamaro

1753–1806

He specialised in the close-up female portrait at a time when ukiyo-e showed figures full length, and was eventually manacled and imprisoned for a print that offended the shogunate.

Formation

Trained under Toriyama Sekien, and made his reputation in partnership with the publisher Tsutaya Jūzaburō, who was the most enterprising figure in the Edo print market and who pushed him toward the bijin-ga, the picture of a beautiful woman. His subjects were the women of the Yoshiwara pleasure district, teahouse waitresses and figures who were, in effect, public celebrities. In 1804 he published a print depicting the sixteenth-century ruler Toyotomi Hideyoshi with his concubines, which was read as a veiled comment on the current shogun; he was handcuffed for fifty days and died two years later.

Technique

The full woodblock apparatus, exploited for surface refinement rather than for drama. Utamaro and Tsutaya used the most expensive available techniques: mica ground, in which powdered mica is applied to the background to create a shimmering grey field that isolates the head; blind embossing for the white of a collar or a fold; and extremely fine line for hair, where individual strands are cut into the block with a precision that pushes the medium to its limit. The compositions crop to head and shoulders, which was a departure, and the figures are elongated well beyond natural proportion.

The palette

Soft, closely valued and expensive. Pale pinks and greys, safflower red, a restrained yellow, black for hair, and the mica ground behind. He works with a much narrower tonal range than Hokusai or Hiroshige, so the pictures depend on the exactness of small differences — the several near-whites of skin, collar and paper are distinguished by embossing and by a change of half a tone. Vegetable dyes make many surviving impressions considerably paler now than when printed.

Legacy

The bijin-ga close-up is his invention and it dominated the genre afterwards. In Europe, Degas and Toulouse-Lautrec took the cropping and the intimate viewpoint almost directly, and the influence on Art Nouveau line is substantial. The 1804 prosecution is also a well-documented instance of censorship of a popular commercial medium.

Palette

The colours reconstructed for this artist, with the reasoning behind each.

Pigments used: Lamp black