Young Woman Leaning over a Tall Lamp

This monochrome woodblock print, held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art (accession number JP1833), depicts a young woman leaning over a tall lamp (andon). The sheet, at 27 by 18.9 cm, is in a compact vertical format and is unusual within Utagawa Kuniyasu's surviving body of work in being printed in monochrome ink on paper rather than in the polychrome nishiki-e idiom that dominates his oeuvre. Monochrome and lightly tinted prints of the early nineteenth century occupied a particular niche within Edo print culture: they were used for book illustration, for inexpensive editions of standard subjects, and for design exercises in which a leading polychrome designer would demonstrate his compositional command in line alone. The intimate scene of a woman leaning over an andon — the tall paper-and-wood oil lamp standard in Edo domestic interiors — belongs to the broader Edo iconography of women in the soft, secluded light of evening that runs from Suzuki Harunobu through Utamaro to the late-Bunka and Bunsei generations. The print entered the Metropolitan Museum as part of the foundational early acquisitions of Japanese prints in the early twentieth century (the "JP" series of accession numbers) and is a representative example of Kuniyasu's command of intimate bijin-ga composition in a quieter, less decorative register than his oban polychrome work.