the traditional treatment of faces. The academic style required the nose to be suggested by an aquiline, calligraphic stroke, the eyes by simple slits, the mouth by a curved flower petal. Utamaro mixed into this unnatural convention a slightly mischievous grace, a spiritual understanding. He kept the traditional lines but brought them closer to human shapes. None of the anatomical details, the graceful lines, the delightful contours of these Japanese women whether lying or standing, escaped his eye. Each of these “feminine figures” took on a true individuality; he was an idealist, who made “a courtesan into a goddess”.
Mother Breastfeeding her Child.
Ōban, nishiki-e, 38.5 × 24.5 cm.
Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris.
Two Young Women with a Child.
Ōban, nishiki-e, 36.8 × 25.1 cm.
Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris.
Summer Bath, from the series “Seven Episodes of Ono no”, early 19th century. Ōban, nishiki-e, 38 × 25.5 cm.
Victoria & Albert Museum, London.
1. Prints (Nishiki-e)
Utamaro produced an enormous number of images in colour, large polychromatic prints. The nishiki-e* is an Ukiyo-e* combining more than two colours. In them Utamaro attains “the ultimate in beauty and luxury.” These marvellous prints, generally made by using three, five, or even seven blocks, in this land of screens and sliding doors, are mounted side by side, one after the other, with no glass to protect such charming moving wall coverings from exposure to the air. Occasionally works by famous masters were incorporated into the border of a fabric, or sealed in lacquer. These prints were done in a variety of formats. They dealt with a wide range of themes, but the principal tendencies were representations of women from all classes, in all situations of daily life, or at the time of the high feasts and ceremonies which punctuate Japanese life, or even the representation of great myths and grand personalities of the country.
These graphic works were not originally meant for use by the general public; they were intended for refined collectors, men of letters, who, in Japan, lived in close company with artists, or for the women represented in Utamaro, and they remained luxury items. But in the nineteenth century their prestige diminished: in the hands of profit-motivated publishers and an undemanding mass audience, the quality of printing diminished and the discrete, muted, and harmonious colours gave way to garish and tawdry colourings. And although, in 1830, the painter Hiroshighe attempted to bring back the colourings of the eighteenth century, it was in vain.
Edmond de Goncourt had the discernment to note a tendency, in the painter of the women of the “green houses”, to portray motherhood, to present the mother in maternal postures, such as breastfeeding. There is the tilted head of our Virgin over the divine Bambino; there is the ecstatic contemplation of the nursing mother; there is the loving embrace in her arms, the delicate wrapping of one hand around an ankle while the other caresses the back of the neck of the child clinging to her breast. He paints the mother rocking the child; bathing it in a wooden vat, the bathtub of that country; a comb between her teeth, gathering up his little queue; one hand through his loose belt, supporting his first steps; amusing him with a thousand little games; having him take a marble from her mouth; frightening him with a mask of a fox, that legendary animal in the nursery rhymes of the country. Even the Japanese encyclopaedia attests to the mythological dimension of this animal by asserting that when the fox blows on the bones of a horse that he is eating, it ignites a fairy fire which illuminates him, so that he then lives one hundred years and salutes the Ursa Major before being transformed.
“Geisha” (Geigi), from the series “Komachi and his Children”, c. 1800.
Naga-Ōban, nishiki-e, 53.1 × 25.2 cm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (left and right sheets) and Honolulu Academy of Arts, Honolulu (centre sheet).
“Husband and Wife Caught in an Evening Shower”
(Fūfu no yū-dachi), from the series “Three Evening Pleasures of the Floating World” (Ukiyo san saki), c. 1800. Naga-Ōban, nishiki-e, 51.4 × 23.3 cm. The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago.
“Breastfeeding” (chibusa), from the series “Yamauba and Kintarō”, c. 1801–1803.
Ōban, nishiki-e, 37.5 × 25.4 cm.
Musée national des Arts asiatiques – Guimet, Paris.
“Water-Basin Mirror” (Mizu kagami), from the series “Eight Views of Courtesans with Mirrors” (Yūkun kagami hakkei), c. 1798–1799.
Ōban, nishiki-e, 38.2 × 25.5 cm.
Musée national des Arts asiatiques – Guimet, Paris.
Yamauba and Kintarō, c. 1796–1804.
“Yamauba Holding Chestnuts, and Kintarō” (Kuri o motsu Yamauba to Kintarō), from the series “Yamauba and Kintarō”, c. 1804–1805.
Naga-Ōban, nishiki-e, 23.6 × 51.7 cm.
Musée national des Arts asiatiques – Guimet, Paris.
Among all these scenes, there is one of a marvellous realism: the scene in which a Japanese mother is helping her child to pee, the mother’s two hands holding the calves of the two spread legs of the child, while, in a gesture typical of infants, his two tiny hands flutter absently above his eyes. In these images of mother and child, in which the existence of the two is, so to speak, not yet completely separate and where, from the womb of the mother, the child seems to have gone directly onto her lap or onto her shoulders, one plate stands out: a mother has her child on her back, leaning forward over her shoulder, and both are looking at themselves in the water collected in the hollow of a tree trunk. Their faces appear to draw closer, to unite, almost to kiss, in the reflection of this natural mirror. Among these expressions devoted to motherhood, one series shows pudgy little children as they caper about above their mothers’ heads, children with chubby arms and legs, with folds of fat at their knees and wrists, who appear in their fleshy nudity, dressed only in a little apron.
Several other series are dedicated to the depiction in images of childhood in the woods, of an heroic child, with mahogany-coloured skin, seen in the Ehon Sosi fearlessly holding a bear cub by the tail and violently pulling it towards him. This future hero, who was nursed, nourished, and brought up by a woman with a wildly-dishevelled mop of black hair who could be mistaken for a Geneviève de Brabant in her cave-dwelling days. Here is the story, no doubt legendary, of this little tyke, named Kintaro. Minamoto no Yorimitsu (944-1021) was one day hunting on the mountain of Ashigara, in the province of Sagami. Not catching any of the sparse game, he pushed on to the more remote parts of the mountain, and there he found a boy with the muscular body of a young Hercules, with very red skin, playing with a bear. Questioned by Yorimitsu, the boy went to fetch his mother. The woman, uncoiffed and dressed in leaves, explained in noble language and in the manner of the court that she did not wish to identify herself. Therefore she is given the name of Yamauba (mountain mother). And yet the mountain mother agreed
