Bun'ya no Yasuhide from the series Modern Children as the Six Poetic Immortals (Tōsei kodomo rokkasen)

Bun'ya no Yasuhide from the series Modern Children as the Six Poetic Immortals (Tosei kodomo rokkasen) belongs to Kitagawa Utamaro's playful project of recasting a canonical literary set, the Rokkasen poets of the ninth century, in contemporary Edo dress. The Harvard Art Museums preserves this sheet, which features Bun'ya no Yasuhide, one of the six immortals listed by Ki no Tsurayuki in the Kokinshu preface. Utamaro substitutes a child for the classical poet, exploiting the genre of mitate, parody, that pervades ukiyo-e, while still drawing on his expertise in Edo bijin-ga. The result reads as both an affectionate study of childhood, attentive to plumpness of cheek and gesture of small hands, and as a knowing literary joke aimed at viewers steeped in classical poetry. The composition typically isolates the figure against a plain ground, the better to register costume details, hair and the small attribute that signals which poet is being portrayed. Color is handled with the soft restraint of Utamaro's late work, blocks of muted ground tones offset by stronger accents in robe patterns. As ukiyo-e, the print exemplifies how the floating-world artist could weave erudition, humor and observational realism into a single sheet aimed at an urban consumer. By rendering the Six Immortals as children, Utamaro also extends his cataloguing instinct, which elsewhere produced surveys of beauties and types, into the domain of literary history. The series stands as one of his more inventive late projects and remains valued for its imaginative crossing of registers.