Oume and Kumenosuke

Dated 1795 and held by the Harvard Art Museums, this Kitagawa Utamaro print depicts Oume and Kumenosuke, characters drawn from one of the popular shinju-mono (love-suicide stories) that captivated the Edo theatrical and publishing worlds. Lovers driven to double suicide by social impossibility recurred in joruri and kabuki throughout the eighteenth century, and ukiyo-e artists translated their stories into images that combined the iconography of celebrity portraiture with the pathos of doomed romance. Utamaro's image, produced during the most fertile half-decade of his career, plays to his strengths: an intimate two-figure composition, exquisitely calibrated postures of lovers leaning into one another, and patterned kimono whose textile design becomes a vehicle for the meaning of the scene. By the mid-1790s, Utamaro had refined his characteristic elongated proportions and elegantly tilted heads, and lovers' compositions like this one gave him room to deploy them at their most expressive. The print sits within his broader fascination with the lives of women whose desires placed them at odds with the order of Edo society, alongside his Yoshiwara portraits and his images of ordinary mothers and daughters. It contributes meaningfully to Harvard's holdings of Edo bijin-ga and to the larger picture of Utamaro as a sensitive chronicler of romantic feeling within ukiyo-e.