Aburaya Osome and the Shop Boy Hisamatsu

Aburaya Osome and the Shop Boy Hisamatsu is a Kitagawa Utamaro design of about 1800 at the Harvard Art Museums. The lovers Osome of the Aburaya oil shop and the young clerk Hisamatsu were among the most beloved tragic pairs of the Osaka and Edo theatres, their story of impossible love and double suicide retold in numerous jouri and kabuki plays throughout the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Utamaro depicts them in his mature Edo bijin-ga manner, with elongated bodies, refined features and patterned robes that adapt the appearance of theatrical costume to the visual conventions of ukiyo-e. The composition concentrates on the intimacy and discretion of the pair, with the slight inclinations of their heads conveying the suppressed emotion that drives the narrative. By rephrasing Osome and Hisamatsu in the idiom of his contemporary beauty prints, Utamaro participates in the wider ukiyo-e practice of mitate, in which characters from literature and drama are brought into the present through the visual language of fashion and youth. As preserved at Harvard, the print provides a clear example of how the artist's late work consolidated his role as the leading interpreter of female emotion in late-eighteenth-century Edo print culture, while extending bijin-ga firmly into the territory of narrative.