Woman in Elaborate Kimono, from the series Elegant Women's Water Margin, One Hundred and Eight Sheets (Fuzoku onna Suikoden, hayakuhachi ban no uchi)

From Utagawa Kuniyoshi's series Elegant Women's Water Margin, One Hundred and Eight Sheets (Fūzoku onna Suikoden, hyakuhachi-ban no uchi), this print shows a woman in elaborate kimono recast as a contemporary counterpart to one of the 108 heroes of the Chinese Water Margin novel. Kuniyoshi had made his reputation in the late 1820s with the Tsūzoku Suikoden series of male warriors derived from the same novel, and the female counterpart series turns that earlier project into a witty mitate (substitution): Edo beauties stand in for the bandit-heroes, each linked to her source figure by an attribute, pose, or cartouche. The series is a particularly clear demonstration of Kuniyoshi's intelligence as a designer of Edo ukiyo-e: the warrior prints that made him famous and the bijin-ga that filled out his market are joined in a single conceptual frame. The kimono in this sheet is rendered with the kind of dense, multi-block pattern carving that distinguishes high-quality 1830s–40s Edo printing, with restrained bokashi at the hem and skin and a strong silhouette that recalls his warrior pose vocabulary. The Harvard Art Museums record the impression without firm year; the series is consistent with his late Tenpō output. The print documents Kuniyoshi's ability to invest the beautiful-woman genre with the narrative weight he gave his fighters. Source: Harvard Art Museums (object 209566).