Group of Women on the Engawa of a Country House, in the time of the Cherry Blossoming

A Metropolitan Museum of Art color woodblock print (accession JP1001, gift of the Estate of Samuel Isham, 1914), dated circa 1806 and catalogued under 'Utamaro II.' The composition is a multi-figure group of women on the engawa — the open veranda — of a country house during cherry-blossom (hanami) season, a setting that allowed late-Edo designers to combine the springtime social occasion of flower-viewing with the bijin-ga grouping of fashionable feminine figures. The veranda format gives the artist a strong horizontal architectural framework against which the curves of figure and kimono pattern play, while the cherry blossoms above and behind establish the seasonal moment. Utamaro II handles the multi-figure group in the Kitagawa house manner — measured spacing, elongated faces, restrained palette — and the print represents the more anecdotal, scene-based mode of his output. The circa 1806 dating again sits at the I/II transitional moment; the Met catalogues firmly under Utamaro II.