Cleaning Combs

Cleaning Combs is a color woodblock print designed by Kitagawa Utamaro around 1797, now held in the collection of the Cleveland Museum of Art. The work shows a woman absorbed in the quiet ritual of tending to her hair ornaments, drawing combs across folded paper to lift away residue and re-polish their lacquered teeth. Utamaro turns this small, domestic act into a study of bodily grace: the slight bend of the neck, the angle of the elbow, and the rhythm of the wrists all carry the careful attention to feminine gesture that defines his approach to Edo bijin-ga. As an ukiyo-e artist working in the late eighteenth century, Utamaro was unusually attentive to the surfaces of everyday life inside the brothels, salons, and merchant homes of the floating world, and he treats the comb here almost as a portrait subject in its own right. The composition isolates the figure against a relatively plain ground so that line and pattern do the descriptive work, with the kimono's textile design contrasting against the smooth volumes of skin and hair. Cleaning Combs belongs to a recurring thread in Kitagawa Utamaro's printmaking in which beauty is shown not at moments of public display but in the unobserved intervals of grooming and preparation. For collectors of Edo bijin-ga, the sheet is a fine example of how Utamaro's mature style fuses the descriptive specificity of ukiyo-e genre prints with an idealized vision of feminine elegance.