'Six Beauties of the Higest Renown'

"Six Beauties of the Highest Renown," dated 1789 and held by the Victoria and Albert Museum, comes from one of Kitagawa Utamaro's early major series and an important step in his development as the leading portraitist of the Yoshiwara. The series belongs to a Tenmei-Kansei wave of celebrity prints that named individual courtesans of the licensed quarter and treated them as starring personalities. Utamaro and his publisher Tsutaya Juzaburo helped pioneer this approach, transforming Edo bijin-ga from a generic genre into a form of named portraiture that responded to and intensified the gossip economy of Edo. By 1789 Utamaro was developing the distinctive elongated faces and refined contour lines that would mature into his celebrated 1790s style. The V&A's impression speaks to the eagerness with which European and American collectors gathered Utamaro's prints in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when the rediscovery of ukiyo-e fed the broader Japoniste enthusiasm that influenced artists from Manet and Whistler to Mary Cassatt. Within Utamaro's own oeuvre, "Six Beauties of the Highest Renown" stands at the threshold between the studio's earlier multi-figure compositions and the half-length okubi-e that would define his peak achievements. The series remains a touchstone for studies of how named beauty became the central subject of Edo woodblock prints.