Ehon waraji jogo (Picture book: The Laughing Drinker)(0013-0015)

Ehon waraji jogo (Picture book: The Laughing Drinker) (sheets 0013-0015), illustrated by Kitagawa Utamaro around 1798 and held by the Art Institute of Chicago, comes from one of the artist's many printed book projects. Ehon, or 'picture books', were a major outlet for designers of ukiyo-e, allowing them to develop sustained imagery on themes that did not always fit single-sheet prints. The Laughing Drinker pursues the comic and convivial side of Edo culture, in which sake drinking, raucous parties, and Edo bijin-ga gatherings often took place under the same roof. In these sheets, Utamaro arranges figures around drinking vessels, food, and shared laughter, using the larger horizontal format of book pages to lay out social space more freely than single-sheet ukiyo-e usually allows. His drawing remains characteristic: women dominate, with their long necks, languid postures, and patterned robes, while male revelers are caricatured more freely. The illustrations belong to a broader tradition of kyoka-ehon and humorous ehon in late eighteenth-century Edo, where artists, poets, and publishers collaborated to celebrate the pleasures of urban life. For collectors of Kitagawa Utamaro, ehon are an important counterweight to the famous single-sheet bijin-ga, showing how flexibly he could handle narrative and group composition. The Art Institute of Chicago's preservation of these sheets allows direct study of the printing and layout that distinguished Utamaro's contribution to the Edo picture book.