2 PUPPETEERS

2 Puppeteers is a Kitagawa Utamaro design at the Harvard Art Museums depicting two figures animating hand puppets. Puppetry was woven into Edo cultural life through the great jouri theatres of Osaka and Edo, through itinerant street performance, and through the small-scale puppet acts that surfaced at festivals and within the Yoshiwara entertainment economy. Utamaro returned to the subject across his career, treating puppet handlers with the same attentive draftsmanship he gave to courtesans and musicians. In this print, the two performers are bent in concentration over their puppets, their hands raised and faces partly turned, capturing the moment when the inert figures begin to come alive. The elongated bodies, oval faces and finely drawn hands mark this as part of Utamaro's mature Edo bijin-ga idiom, even though the subject matter sits at the edge of conventional beauty prints. Patterned robes and economical backgrounds focus the eye on gesture and the small wooden puppets themselves. Such designs illustrate how ukiyo-e absorbed the entire performance ecology of the city, treating street artists, musicians and puppeteers as worthy of the same dignified pictorial attention as the highest-ranking courtesans. As preserved at Harvard, the print expands the range of subjects through which Utamaro's contribution to ukiyo-e can be appreciated.