Three Women Walking

Three Women Walking is a Kitagawa Utamaro design at the Harvard Art Museums showing a closely grouped trio of female figures moving across the sheet. Compositions of two or three beauties in motion were a recurring vehicle within Edo bijin-ga for Utamaro's exploration of bodily relation - how figures lean, glance and pass close to one another. Here the three women, possibly courtesans with an attendant or fashionable townswomen on a seasonal outing, are arranged so that their bodies overlap in graceful diagonals. Utamaro's draftsmanship uses long unbroken outlines to define their robes, while small adjustments in head angle and gaze suggest conversation and inner thought. Patterned kimonos in the carefully separated colours of nishiki-e printing identify each figure's status and taste, and the open background concentrates attention on silhouette and gesture. Such prints functioned both as fashion plates and as portraits of an idealised modern femininity that Utamaro did more than any other ukiyo-e designer to define. Their popularity helped to drive the late eighteenth-century print market and to elevate bijin-ga to a position of cultural importance alongside actor prints. As preserved at the Harvard Art Museums, Three Women Walking offers an accessible example of Utamaro's mature group composition, in which the spaces between bodies become as expressive as the figures themselves.