Mosquito Net (Kaya), from the series Model Young Women Woven in Mist (Kasumi-ori musume hinagata)

Mosquito Net (Kaya), from Kitagawa Utamaro's 1794 series Model Young Women Woven in Mist (Kasumi-ori musume hinagata), brings together two of the artist's signal preoccupations: the visual play of translucent textiles and the intimate moments of female domestic life that he had recast as fully fledged subjects of Edo bijin-ga. The mosquito net of the title, a fixture of summer in late-eighteenth-century Japanese households, becomes a screen that softens and complicates the body of the young woman behind it, allowing Utamaro to demonstrate the printmaker's command of layered surfaces. The series title invokes kasumi-ori, a hazy weave of fine cloth, casting each design as a textile sample of female beauty types. Utamaro's collaborator-publisher Tsutaya Juzaburo issued the set, and the carving and printing realize delicate gradations of sheer net, hair, and kimono pattern that few earlier ukiyo-e designs had attempted. The Art Institute of Chicago houses the present impression among its Japanese print holdings. Within Utamaro's output the kaya prints occupy a place beside the better-known mirror, lamp, and bath scenes in which everyday objects mediate access to the female subject. The design exemplifies how Utamaro extended the okubi-e tradition into more complex spatial games while preserving the sense of suspended attention that became a hallmark of his bijin-ga.