Fūryū Mu Tamagawa (Elegant Six Tama Rivers)

Fūryū Mu Tamagawa (風流六玉川, 'Elegant Six Tama Rivers') is a color woodblock print by Kitagawa Hidemaro of the early nineteenth century, held by the Museum of Fine Arts Boston (object number 217099). The series title belongs to the long Edo tradition of Mu Tamagawa ('Six Tama Rivers') mitate prints, in which each of the six classical Tama Rivers of Japanese poetry — Tamagawa of Mount Kōya, of Chōfu, of Tetsukuri-no-sato, of Noda, of Noji, and of Ide — is illustrated by a contemporary bijin scene. Chōbunsai Eishi had produced the most celebrated treatment of the theme in the late 1780s under the same title; Hidemaro's series of the early 1800s continues the mitate template into the Bunka decade. Each print pairs one of the six rivers (each associated with a specific poetic theme — fulling cloth, kerria flowers, wild geese, frogs, plovers, and yamabuki) with a Yoshiwara beauty whose attributes or surroundings evoke the classical reference. The figural style follows Hidemaro's characteristic Kitagawa-school vocabulary — elongated neck, narrow oval face, patterned kimono falling in long vertical folds — and the series places him within the same literary-mitate tradition that had defined his teacher's mature work.