Kitagawa Fujimaro

Kitagawa Fujimaro (喜多川藤麿, active c. 1804-1820s, died 1830) was a pupil of Kitagawa Utamaro (c. 1753-1806) and a representative figure of the late-Edo nikuhitsu ukiyo-e tradition - the line of ukiyo-e painters who, alongside the woodblock-print designers of the same school, produced one-of-a-kind paintings on silk or paper for the same merchant patronage that consumed brocade prints. He is one of the better-documented members of the Kitagawa workshop's second generation, succeeding to the studio after his teacher's death in the spring of 1806 and continuing to sign work into the 1820s. His birth date is not securely recorded; the conventional terminus of his career is the 1830 death date preserved in nineteenth-century compilations.

Fujimaro's surviving output is dominated by single-figure or small-group bijin-ga (beautiful-women pictures) in the Utamaro manner, painted in ink, mineral pigments, and the white shell-derived pigment gofun on silk grounds and mounted as hanging scrolls. His brushwork is tighter than Utamaro's late style, the contour line carried at an even weight from the throat down through the folds of the kosode, and his palette - typically reserved, organised around the muted reds, mineral blues, and silver-grey ink washes that came into fashion in Edo painting after the turn of the nineteenth century - separates his work both from the more flamboyant chromatic register of Utamaro's polychrome prints of the 1790s and from the later, more theatrical bijin-ga of designers like Keisai Eisen. Where Utamaro's nishiki-e bijin had concentrated on close-cropped facial types in the okubi-e (large-head picture) format, Fujimaro typically returns the figure to full length, anchoring her within an implied interior or - more characteristically - on an outdoor stage of bank, garden, or riverside, with the surrounding landscape suppressed to a few washes of ink that establish setting without competing with the figure.

The Cleveland Museum of Art preserves a representative full-length scroll, Man Strolling with a Boy Carrying Flowering Branch (1985.256), datable to around 1810, in which a young man strolls in front of a boy carrying flowering plum branches. The inscribed poem deploys the standard Edo pun on iro - 'colour' and 'love' - and reads the cherry blossoms of Edo's Yoshiwara as a metaphor for mature courtesans while assigning the plum blossom to handsome young men, an exchange that signals the painting's place within the homoerotic strand of Edo cultural production. A second important full-length painting, Two Oharame on the Bank of a Stream (Minneapolis Institute of Art, 74.1.161), of the 1810s, presents two oharame - charcoal-bundle vendors from the village of Ohara north of Kyoto - balancing their loads on their heads beside a slow-moving stream. The inscription, signed Fujimarotei Ichijin, contrasts the women's pale skin with the dark brushwood they carry, exploiting a standard bijin-ga trope of complexion against accessory in a brief comic vein.