Oh How Cold! (ō tsumetai), from the series "Propitious Products of Mountains and Seas" (Sankai medetai zue)

Dated 1852, "Oh How Cold! (ō tsumetai)," from the series Sankai medetai zue (Propitious Products of Mountains and Seas), is an Edo ukiyo-e print by Utagawa Kuniyoshi (1797-1861), held in the Harvard Art Museums (object 201165). The series is one of Kuniyoshi's many late comic-bijin projects, in which each design pairs an exclamation or wishful phrase voiced by a beautiful woman with a punning reference to a regional product (sankai medetai zue literally means "auspicious products of mountains and seas"). The format relies on the kind of wordplay (goroawase) and homophonic punning that suffused Edo popular culture: the woman's spoken complaint or wish doubles as the name of a famous regional speciality, often a local food or natural product. Kuniyoshi exploits this conceit with characteristic visual wit, depicting a fashionable young woman in an attitude that illustrates the spoken phrase - here, the chilliness implied by "ō tsumetai" - while integrating cartouches that point to the corresponding mountain or marine product. By 1852, Kuniyoshi had developed a mature and often subversive comic style. Even when working in apparently lighthearted material, he kept up the close attention to fashionable dress, hairstyles, and pose that distinguishes his bijin work. Such prints sat alongside his warrior prints in publishers' shops, demonstrating how the same designer could move easily between heroic and humorous registers within Edo ukiyo-e. The series is now an important document of mid-nineteenth-century print humor and material culture.