Yamauba and Kintoki

Kitagawa Utamaro's ukiyo-e print Yamauba and Kintoki engages one of the artist's most distinctive late projects, a sequence of designs devoted to the mountain woman Yamauba and the boy hero Kintoki. According to legend, Yamauba raised Kintoki, who later joined the warrior Minamoto no Yorimitsu as Sakata no Kintoki, and the pair offered Utamaro a chance to redirect the gentle intimacy of Edo bijin-ga toward a wilder, mythic relationship. Yamauba is shown with a powerful body and unbound hair, her face still drawn with the elongated oval and slender neck of Utamaro's beauties but invested with a maternal weight unusual for the bijin-ga repertoire. Kintoki, a sturdy red-skinned child often carrying weapons or wrestling animals, is rendered with a robust outline that gives the print its compositional energy. The juxtaposition between the supple mother and the muscular child made the series a vehicle for exploring tenderness, strength and the line between the human and the supernatural, and it stands out for its mythic ambition within the artist's predominantly urban output. The Harvard Art Museums preserves this impression (object 208023), where it joins a strong holding of Utamaro Yamauba and Kintoki prints.