Twelve Hours of Spring Pleasures: Hour of the Dragon

Although the Metropolitan Museum of Art's catalogue assigns this print a date of 1786, the work itself, signed by Utagawa Kunisada (born that same year), must in fact belong to his mature career as a designer of Edo ukiyo-e bijinga. "Twelve Hours of Spring Pleasures: Hour of the Dragon" forms part of a serial bijinga project organized by the twelve traditional hours of the Edo day, each corresponding to one of the zodiac animals. The Hour of the Dragon, roughly mid-morning, was the moment at which the daytime activities of the pleasure quarters, theaters, and tea houses were just getting underway. Kunisada uses the conceit to picture a stylish young woman engaged in a characteristic spring activity of that hour: completing her morning toilette, preparing tea, or stepping out toward an appointment. As one of the school's principal designers of female beauty, he renders the figure with the elongated body, slightly turned head, and assertively patterned kimono that defined his bijinga of the 1820s through 1840s. The series belongs to a long tradition of "twelve hours" prints in Edo ukiyo-e, going back to Suzuki Harunobu and beyond, but Kunisada modernizes the convention by deploying the deeper colors and more elaborately printed surfaces available to him as the chuban and oban formats expanded their technical range. The Metropolitan Museum of Art holds this impression within its bijinga collection, where it documents Kunisada's command of the seasonal-hour series, one of the principal organizing fictions of late Edo print culture.