Courtesan Kamiya Jihei and Kinokuniya Koharu, from the series True Feelings Compared: The Founts of Love (Jitsu kurabe iro no minakami)

Courtesan Kamiya Jihei and Kinokuniya Koharu, from the series True Feelings Compared: The Founts of Love (Jitsu kurabe iro no minakami), is a color woodblock print of about 1793 by Kitagawa Utamaro in the Art Institute of Chicago. The lovers Jihei, a paper merchant of the Kamiya family, and Koharu, a courtesan of the Kinokuniya in Osaka's Sonezaki quarter, were familiar from Chikamatsu Monzaemon's play The Love Suicides at Amijima, in which their relationship leads to a shinjū at a temple by the Amijima river. Utamaro brings them together in the half-length, paired composition that he made the signature mode of his Edo bijin-ga, with the courtesan's elaborately ornamented hair contrasted against the merchant's plainer dress. Both figures are absorbed in private thought, eyes lowered, mouths slightly parted, the line of one body leaning subtly toward the other. The series title, comparing true feelings as if they were rival waterworks at a fountain, frames the lovers' relationship as one of authentic interior emotion measured against social constraint. Knowing the play's tragic ending, an Edo audience could read the print as a moment held just before catastrophe. The patterned robes and the carefully observed hair give Utamaro the opportunity to demonstrate his ukiyo-e draughtsmanship, while the emotional content secures the print's status as one of his most affecting treatments of theatrical lovers. The Art Institute of Chicago's impression is a strong example of how Kitagawa Utamaro grounded his bijin-ga in the lived feeling of his characters.