Women by a Palanquin (from the series Chinese and Japanese Poems by Seven Year Old Girls of Recent Times)

Women by a Palanquin (from the series Chinese and Japanese Poems by Seven Year Old Girls of Recent Times), a Kitagawa Utamaro print of about 1797 in the Cleveland Museum of Art, joins his late 1790s engagement with literary mitate. The series ostensibly attributes poems to precocious young girls, drawing on a classical motif of remarkable child poets to frame contemporary scenes. This sheet shows fashionable women gathered around a palanquin, that distinctive box-and-pole conveyance carried by porters that one used to traverse Edo's streets in style. Utamaro arranges the women in his characteristic Edo bijin-ga manner, with the palanquin's geometry providing a counterweight to the more fluid lines of bodies and robes. The literary frame allows the design to be read as both genre scene and as illustration of a verse, with the implicit poem hovering over the depicted action. Utamaro's drawing is at its mid-1790s best: faces are tilted at slight angles for variety, hairstyles and ornaments distinguish individual figures, and the printing carries patterned textiles without overwhelming the composition. As ukiyo-e, the sheet exemplifies how Kitagawa Utamaro could absorb classical poetic conceit into images of everyday urban movement. For collectors of Edo bijin-ga, the Cleveland Museum of Art impression preserves both the painterly figural grouping and the literary framing that gives the series its distinctive identity.