Rainstorm:
This shows a torrential, drowning rain laying waste to the countryside. A young girl plugs her ears at the noise of the far-off thunder. A boy in tears holds his little arms up to his mother, imploring her to pick him up. Umbrellas are being hastily opened all around, and in the central panel, a pair of lovers run along under the same umbrella, the girl in the same charming running motion as the Atlas of the Tuileries Garden in Paris. The couple are being followed closely by a friend. This scene offers a surprisingly real, understandable, and, one could even say, ethereal, depiction of people engaged in a frantic race.
House-cleaning:
Servants in their morning dress are doing a major house cleaning, which takes place around the end of December. Amongst overturned furniture and screens, they are chasing away mice in a great flurry of brooms, feather dusters, and mop water. The fourth panel represents a woman trying to lift a sleepy young man onto his feet because it is time for him to leave. As she pulls him up by the underarms, he makes limp attempts to attach his sword to his belt. The fifth panel shows an old man being awakened, so ridiculous in his contortions and stretching that one woman runs away laughing.
Also worthy of note:
The Street in Edo Suruga-chō, in front of the Silk Shops:
Shopfronts covered by curtains, under the raised portions of which can be seen, in the background, the display of fabrics spread before the purchasers seated in a circle on the floor.
The Flowers of the Five Festivals:
Five women, under a violet canopy sown with cherry blossoms, have in a vase or a hanging urn flowering branches of the festival season.
The Stroll of Noblewomen and Children, under blue Parasols:
Behind the noble women and children walks a domestic carrying a lunch pail in a sack and a cask of sake.
The Musicians:
Five women are kneeling on a purple mat, playing the shamisen*, the biwa*, the komabue*, the koto*, and the kotsuzumi*. It is a most charming composition surmounted by an ornamental band in excellent taste, pink and scattered with white cherry blossoms.
Porters:
In the street, women, children, and, in the middle, on the back of the porters, clothing trunks containing deliveries made by the shops (work probably composed of five panels).
Opening Night of the Sumida:
In a night sky filled with stars, fireworks burst, and on the water, a multitude of women’s boats crowds one another as the boatmen quarrel.
Women on a Terrace:
Japanese women are seated on a terrace on the bank of a river on the opposite shore of which is a large bridge on stilts in a green landscape. Lying, sitting on their heels, and kneeling, these women read, take tea, and play music.
Niwaka Festival Performers in a Yoshiwara Tea-House (Hikite-jaya no nikawa-shū), c. 1800–1801.
Ōban triptych, nishiki-e, right sheet: 37.9 × 25.5 cm; centre sheet: 37.7 × 25.4 cm; left sheet: 37.8 × 25.3 cm.
Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, Dresden.
“House-Cleaning” (Susuhaki), c. 1797–1799.
Ōban pentatych, nishiki-e. The British Museum, London.
“Courtesans Processing in Front of Stacked Boxes” (Tsumimono mae no yūjo), 1795. Ōban triptych, nishiki-e, right sheet: 37.5 × 24 cm; centre sheet: 37.5 × 23.7 cm; left sheet: 37.5 × 24.6 cm. Chiba City Museum of Art, Chiba.
Procession of Children:
A joyful march of children, one of whom carries an iron lance decorated with a tuft of feathers (work no doubt composed of five panels).
Singers and Flowers of Edo:
(work probably composed of five panels).
Nishiki-e* in three panels
Utamaro’s three-panel compositions, those triptychs so highly favoured by Japanese artists, are very numerous. These beautiful pages have, in the eyes of the educated collector, the seductive charm of the “art print”. They seem not to have suffered for having been massively reproduced mechanically. The designs of the great master seem to have kept, in their interpretation by the printer, their clarity, their lucidity, and their aqueous quality so reminiscent of the watercolour! When put side by side with modern prints, what a contrast between their harmonious greens, blues, reds, yellows, violets and these greens which assault the eyes, these harsh blues, these muddy reds, these ochre-tainted yellows, these calico violets! What an enormous difference between their luminosity and the dull, shallow look of these images in which the rough colourings look as though they were made with cheap powders.
Let it suffice to cite this one example of The Dragonfly in the Poppies, for the Picture Book: Selected Insects (Illustrations 1, 2, 3, 4), not the print in the book, which is itself very beautiful in the early editions, but one of the very first proofs, a test proof, perhaps. This is not printing, this is a drawing in all its finesse and lightness, with the “human touch” aspect of a true drawing, rather than something reproduced many times over. In the same way this plate, showing two women and a little girl at the foot of a bridge, does not resemble so much a print as it does a watercolour, where the delicate relief of its embroidery, highlighted with a bit of gold, and its embossing, have become accessories to art. There are in these astonishing works so gentle a fading away of colour, and so tender a diffusion of their hues, that they appear to be the colours of a watercolour still wet from the artist’s brush, or the languidly luminous colours of Fragonard’s miniatures of children, dashed off on ivory medallions.
In this enormous and incredible output of admirable prints, one must linger over these series with silver backgrounds, with mirrors before which women are dressing, mirrors with frames and little stands, lacquered in true lacquer. There are also those prints with a thousand details, with meticulous execution, rendered by a thousand tiny strokes, the roots of the lush hair on the temples and the forehead, that hair which in modern prints is but a jumbled, murky mass; and then those prints in which, in the silver coating of the backgrounds, adding to these images something like the reflection of pale moonlight, the women, with their discrete colouring, have skin the colour of tea-roses and appear in dresses of deep blue, currant red, or of a greenish golden yellow, dressed in colours of a delicacy unequalled in the coloured prints of any other country.
Backgrounds always received great attention from Utamaro. He never gave his women the bare whiteness of the paper as a background, enveloping them sometimes in a straw yellow or orange with little clouds of dark, glistening mica dust to break its flatness, sometimes against a greyish shade, which in his work, has something of a beach, moistened by the sea, but from which it has retreated. Rather than leave his backgrounds blank, he made them undulate with a wave of a violet or tobacco shade. Sometimes, as in the series of which we have just spoken, the backgrounds around the figures show a silvery sheen such as might have been left by a snail, but which was made using silver or silver-white extracted from the ablet fish. His backgrounds may also have the look of oxidised metal, reminiscent of those in the works of his predecessor, Shiraku: bizarre, strange, surprising backgrounds, with daring colouring on metal, backgrounds
