The Poet Sojo Henjo, from the series "Modern Children as the Six Immortal Poets (Tosei kodomo rokkasen)"

The Poet Sojo Henjo, from Kitagawa Utamaro's c. 1799 series Modern Children as the Six Immortal Poets (Tosei kodomo rokkasen), reframes the famous Rokkasen, the classical canon of six immortal waka poets, by casting their roles to contemporary Edo children. The ninth-century poet Sojo Henjo, originally a courtier who took Buddhist orders, here appears as a small child in mitate, dressed and posed to evoke his identity while remaining unmistakably a late-eighteenth-century Edo youth. The Art Institute of Chicago impression demonstrates Utamaro's late ukiyo-e idiom: soft round faces typical of his children, restrained color blocks, calligraphic outlining of robes and props, and a cartouche relating each child to the classical figure being parodied. Children's prints, often treated as a sentimental subgenre, are in Utamaro's hands an extension of his Edo bijin-ga sensibility, in which categories of human types (courtesans, geisha, townswomen, mothers, children) are systematically mapped onto inherited literary and pictorial schemes. The series testifies to his interest in how cultural memory could be domesticated into household life.