Kitagawa Tsukimaro

Kitagawa Tsukimaro (喜多川月麿, active c. 1794-1836) was one of the most accomplished pupils of Kitagawa Utamaro and a significant figure in the second generation of late-Edo bijin-ga. His birth and death dates are not securely documented — a circumstance not unusual for ukiyo-e designers of merchant or chōnin background — but his print career can be reconstructed in some detail from signed work, publisher colophons, and book illustrations spanning roughly four decades. The Met catalogues him under the name he used in the first decade of his career, Kitagawa Kikumaro, while later collections file the same artist under his more famous later signature Tsukimaro. The shift from one name to the other, around 1804, marks an important inflection in the way he positioned himself within and ultimately beyond the Utamaro school.

Nothing is known with certainty about Tsukimaro's early life, but the convention of the Kitagawa atelier — by which advanced pupils received a portion of the master's name (the 'maro' suffix) — places him firmly within Utamaro's workshop by the mid-1790s. His earliest dated prints appear around 1794-95, designed under the name Kikumaro ('Chrysanthemum Maro'). These designs are stylistically close to Utamaro's own bijin-ga of the same years: tall standing courtesans rendered in three-quarter view, the elongated proportions and small oval faces that defined the Kansei-era Yoshiwara portrait. Like the other Kitagawa pupils — Hidemaro, Takemaro, Shikimaro, and the later Utamaro II — Kikumaro worked primarily for the Yoshiwara-oriented publishers who had made his master's reputation, including Tsutaya Jūzaburō, Nishimuraya Yohachi, and Yamadaya Sanshirō. His most ambitious projects of the late 1790s and early 1800s, including the triptych A Votive Picture to Be Donated to the Kannon of Asakusa (ca. 1800), display a confident grasp of the Utamaro idiom and an interest in depicting the named celebrities of the Edo pleasure quarters by name, in the manner of his master's Seirō Nenjū Gyōji and other Yoshiwara-life series.

In 1804, the same year that Utamaro was arrested and briefly imprisoned by the shogunate for a print depicting the sixteenth-century warlord Toyotomi Hideyoshi — a politically charged image that ran afoul of Kansei-era restrictions on the representation of Tokugawa-era political subjects — Kikumaro changed his signature to Tsukimaro ('Moon Maro'). The reasons for the change are not fully clear; some scholars have suggested it reflected a desire to distinguish himself from the troubled master, others that the lunar-themed name simply represented an artistic maturation. Whatever the cause, the change of signature coincided with a noticeable broadening of his subject matter and a slow drift away from the Utamaro half-length okubi-e in favor of full-length standing figures, intimate genre scenes, and night settings. Utamaro himself died in 1806, two years after the punishment, and the master's leading pupils — Tsukimaro among them — emerged in the latter half of the first decade of the nineteenth century as the inheritors of the Kitagawa manner.