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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 to Yorimitsu’s request when he asked her to let him take charge of the child, telling him that he was the son of a great general of Minamoto clan, killed in a war against Taira clan. Thus, she had raised the boy in the mountain to be a hero.

When the child was grown, he took the name of Sakata no Kintoki after the lands with which he had been rewarded by Yorimitsu, who had made him one of his four highest officers. In the mountain of Oyeyama, and in the province of Tampa, there lived a great devil, an outlaw named Shuten-doji, who pillaged the neighbouring provinces, shamelessly carrying off young maidens and, with his band of devils, routing the soldiers of the provincial governors. Complaints arrived at the court and Yorimitsu was appointed to lead an expedition against the brigand. But instead of taking a whole battalion with him, he took just Kintoki and his three high officers, disguised as pilgrims. Having made the brigands drunk on sake and dancing with them, and while Kintoki hand wrestled with Shuten-doji, holding his hands and laughing, Yorimitsu drew his sword like lightening and cut off his head so quickly that, on the other side of the room people were still dancing without suspecting anything. A general melee ensued, but the five heroes, among whom was Kintoki, accomplished feats of prowess and overpowered the devils who were demoralised by the death of their chieftain, burning their hideout and returning the captive women to their homes.

Kintoki is also the hero of another adventure. When Yorimitsu fell ill as a result of a wound inflicted by a monstrous spider, he set out with three of his comrades to slay it.

We must also mention Momotarō. Along with Kintarō, this other legendary boy is honoured by Japanese children who fill their albums with depictions of his feats and adventures. The fable tells the story of an old couple. One day, while the man was cutting wood and the woman was washing laundry in the stream, there rose up from the water a huge red thing which the old woman recognised as an enormous peach: peach momo. She waited for her husband to cut it open. […]. Great was the astonishment of the old couple to find a beautiful boy inside, whom they named Momotarō (peach child). The child soon became a tall charming youth. But in those days, the people who lived on the coast were being eaten by the horrible inhabitants of a neighbouring island. One day the young man, accompanied by his dog, his monkey, and his pheasant, set sail for the island. Once there, he and his companions began to accomplish such marvels that the king of the island agreed to stop the cannibalistic expeditions. Ever since this promise, the inhabitants of Japan have been able to live unmolested.

“Woman Holding up a Piece of Fabric” (Nuno o kazasu onna), c. 1795–1796.

Ōban, nishiki-e, 38 × 25.5 cm.

Musée national des Arts asiatiques – Guimet, Paris.

“Mosquito-Net” (Kaya), 1797.

Ōban, nishiki-e, 37.6 × 24.8 cm.

Musée national des Arts asiatiques – Guimet, Paris.

“Parody of the Procession of a Korean Ambassador” (Mitate Tōjin gyōretsu), c. 1797–1798. Ōban, seven sheets, nishiki-e. The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago.

Let us look at some of these marvellous prints.

Series of the Large Heads:

Among the prints dedicated to women, there is a series of some one hundred prints, the collection of the Large Heads, where the head of a woman is depicted almost life-sized with a part of the upper torso. These prints, in which the head is always depicted with a traditional hieratic quality featuring the fine arched eyebrows and the typical beauty so highly prized in Japan, distinguish themselves through the bit of the dress seen covering the shoulders and bust of these women, or by a fan or a screen which they hold in their fingertips. Their dimensions and print quality are admirable, and the embossing sets off the white of a chrysanthemum, of a cherry blossom petal against a blue or mauve dress, or the white of the pattern in a border, and creates a trompe-l’œil with the relief of its embroidery. These prints of the Large Heads, done for the most part around 1795, are interesting not only for their beauty, but for the information they reveal about the imitations, the plagiarism, and the thefts of the artist’s signature by his colleagues: Utamaro, as a warning to the public against the counterfeits circulating under his name, signed this series “the real Utamaro”.

Nishiki-e* in seven panels

These works made up of seven contiguous sheets are not numerous, but among them should be mentioned:

Parody of the Procession of a Korean Ambassador:

A long line of women on foot and on horseback are bearing one of their own on a litter resembling a shrine: all the women are wearing strange, pointed green hats and harmonious dresses, in which the blue, green, mauve, and yellow recall the decoration on Chinese green family porcelain, hues which so greatly influenced the watercolours of the Japanese masters leading up to Utamaro.

Nishiki-e* in six panels

The Six Tamagawa:

Women walking in the countryside, where a child is wading in a stream near a washerwoman beating her laundry with a stick.

Nishiki-e* in five panels

The series of works composed of five contiguous sheets has many more examples:

The Boys’ Feast Day:

A woman leans over an album, near another woman, a brush in her hand ready to paint: both are being watched by a child in a room where a revolving easel with a little parasol holds a kakemono* representing, in blood red, the terrible Shōki, the exterminator of devils, a kind of patron saint of boys. This exterminator of devils has his own legend. Chung Kwei, the hunter of devils, in one of the favourite myths of the Chinese, was reputed to be a supernatural protector of the emperor Xuanzong (713–762) against the evil spirits who haunted his palace. His story is told as follows in the E honko jidan: the emperor Genso came down with a fever. In his delirium, he saw a little demon who was stealing the flute of his mistress Yokiki (Yang Guifei) at the same moment a hardy spirit appeared, seized the demon and ate it. When the emperor asked him his name, he answered: “I am Shinshi Shōki, of the mountain of Shunan. During the reign of emperor Koso (Kao tsu) of the Butoku period (618–627), I was unable to reach the rank to which I aspired in the high office of the State. Out of shame I killed myself. But at my funeral, I was posthumously promoted, by imperial order, to a high honour and now I am trying to do justice to the favour which was bestowed upon me. This is why I want to exterminate all the demons in the land.” Genso woke up; his illness had disappeared. He then ordered Godoshi to paint a picture of the exterminator of devils and to distribute copies of it throughout the empire.

Year-end Fair at Asakusa:

The market which is held during the last ten days of the year takes place before the great gate of the temple of Asakusa. A crowd is walking through mountains of tubs, sifters, and household utensils, over the top of which here and there are visible, carried on heads, New Year’s day presents typical of Japan: a lobster on a bed of ferns, an object made of twisted straw to keep devils out of the houses, etc. In the midst of the crowd, two little girls avoid being separated and lost by each holding one end of a length of cloth tightly in her hands, and a small boy lifts a little pagoda over his head, a toy pagoda for sale.

“Year-End Fair at Asakusa” (Asakusa toshi no ichi), c. 1800–1801.

Ōban, five sheets, nishiki-e, 38.7 × 25.2 (left), 38.5 × 24.8 cm (2), 38.5 × 75.1 cm (3–5). The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago.

The 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 which truly make one want to say that in these paper images, the painter wished to reproduce the multicoloured patina of Japanese bronzes. This search for what can be used to punctuate a background was so important and taken to such lengths of inventiveness in Utamaro’s work, that in one outstanding print, that of the Mother giving a warm Bath to her Child, the lower part of the plate is artistically dusted with ground charcoal, used in heating a bath.

Some of these beautiful prints stand out by showing several different stages of the same composition. For example, in House-cleaning, there are three different versions of colouring: a first one, in which the contours outlined by the thinnest lines contain a combination of faded colours, almost entirely in the green and yellow range; a second, which introduces hints of blues and violets; and a third, with naturalistic colours, is still quite harmonious, but with a less distinctive polychromy.

Another most curious print is The Princess, Having Left her Imperial Chariot, Walking in the Countryside. It is a print dominated by violet and which, in this first stage of colouring, seems to be an attempt by the printer to give the impression of a plate printed using gold, where all the tones are yellows or brownish yellow, against which the beautiful blacks of the lacquered wheels of the imperial chariot stand out sharply. In the second set, the results, which in fact were achieved by technical means through the thickness of the absorbent paper, reveal a deep colour which has penetrated and passed through the paper. Here, the major part of the colouring has been absorbed and held inside, and the only part of it which shows is that which shines through the silk of the Japanese paper, like colours under a glaze.

But this is not all: there is in these prints a breaking down of the colour which further encourages the illusion of a watercolour-like wash, with hues broken by the brush, a decomposition brought on not only by air, sunlight, and exposure. This is an intentional diminishment, prepared in advance by substances mixed with the colours – herbal extracts, and trade secrets which have been lost but which have created such pale pinks, such deliciously yellow greens suggesting old moss, such languidly delicate blues and iridescent mauves: a decomposition which, in the flat areas, where colour is most important, brings about veinings, marblings, “agatisations”, like those seen in malachite, turquoise, and gem stones, and prepares those extraordinary underlying effects, so beautifully nuanced and almost shifting, which go beyond the immobility of a uniform tint, to enhance and complement the ornamentalism and the richness of a robe’s embroidery.