Artist, Block Carver, Applying Sizing (Eshi, hangashi, dosa-biki), from the series The Cultivation of Brocade Prints, a Famous Product of Edo (Edo meibutsu nishiki-e kosaku)

Artist, Block Carver, Applying Sizing (Eshi, hangashi, dosa-biki), from the series The Cultivation of Brocade Prints, a Famous Product of Edo (Edo meibutsu nishiki-e kosaku), is a Kitagawa Utamaro design of about 1798 held by the Art Institute of Chicago. The series is unusual within ukiyo-e because it depicts, with characteristic Utamaro bijin-ga grace, the very craft that produced the prints themselves. Here we see three stages of nishiki-e production: a designer at work with brush and paper, a block carver bent over a woodblock with chisel, and a young woman applying dosa, the sizing solution that prepared each sheet of paper for printing. Utamaro substitutes Edo women in idealized form for the men who in reality did much of this labor, transforming a workshop document into a celebration of female competence and beauty. Within the series, the female figures act as a kind of muse-personification of the trades, each holding her tool with composure and concentration. For collectors of Kitagawa Utamaro and of ukiyo-e in general, the Edo meibutsu nishiki-e kosaku cycle is a key historical source: it shows what late eighteenth-century viewers thought worth depicting about the publishing industry that made artists like Utamaro famous. The Art Institute of Chicago impression preserves all the technical detail of brush, chisel, and brush of sizing, while remaining unmistakably an Edo bijin-ga in style.