Mother and Child, from the series Meisho fūkei bijin jūni sō

Mother and Child, from Kitagawa Utamaro's c. 1798 series Meisho fukei bijin juni so (Twelve Physiognomies of Beautiful Women Representing Views of Famous Places), held by the Art Institute of Chicago, fuses two of his characteristic late-career interests: the typological survey and the domestic portrait. Each sheet of the series pairs a famous Edo locale with a type of woman whose physiognomy, manner, or activity is taken as emblematic; in this design the type is a mother attentive to her young child. Utamaro brings to the pair the same calibrated observation he gave to the courtesans of the Yoshiwara, here applied to maternal gesture, the angle of an inclined head, the way a small body leans against a larger one. The link to meisho (famous places) reminds the viewer that motherhood itself, in this conception, can be regarded as a feature of the urban landscape, as worthy of cataloguing as any landmark bridge or shrine. Within Edo bijin-ga, the print is a model of how ukiyo-e expanded its frame to include the daily intimacies of female life.