Teasing the Baby with a Winter Cherry (Hōzuki), from an untitled series of everyday scenes

Teasing the Baby with a Winter Cherry (Hozuki), from an untitled series of everyday scenes, is a Kitagawa Utamaro print of about 1794 in the Harvard Art Museums. Hozuki, the bright orange fruit of the Chinese lantern plant, was a familiar plaything held by mothers and older siblings to capture an infant's attention, its bell-like rattle and saturated color uniquely suited to such use. Utamaro stages the scene at close range, in the manner of his okubi-e bijin portraits, so that mother and child fill the sheet, the hozuki dangling between them as the focus of mutual attention. The composition turns on small gestures: the woman's tilted head, the infant's reaching hand, the slight twist of fingers as she shows him the fruit. As Edo bijin-ga, the print represents Kitagawa Utamaro's mature absorption of the mother-and-child theme, in which intimate domestic moments are given the same close, attentive design that he elsewhere reserved for celebrated courtesans. The result is a quiet but technically refined image in which everyday Edo life appears almost monumental within the small space of a single sheet. The printing makes the most of the limited palette, with the warm hozuki standing out against gentler tones. For collectors of Kitagawa Utamaro and of ukiyo-e mother-and-child prints, the Harvard Art Museums impression offers a particularly tender example of his domestic mode.