Courtesans and Attendants Making a Giant Snowball

This Edo ukiyo-e print by Utagawa Toyokuni I (1769-1825) depicts courtesans and their attendants engaged in the wintertime amusement of building a giant snowball, a recurring subject in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century bijinga that combined the refined glamour of the licensed pleasure quarters with seasonal genre observation. Yoshiwara courtesans rarely appeared outside the gated district except on processional outings, and prints showing them at play with snow—rolling enormous balls of it, sculpting Daruma figures, watching from windows as it fell on the rooftops of the brothel quarter—offered viewers an intimate fantasy of the women in unguarded relaxation. The compositional opportunity, with elaborately patterned kimono set against white snow and the focal volume of the great snowball, attracted designers from Suzuki Harunobu through Utamaro to Toyokuni and his Utagawa-school followers. Toyokuni's contribution to the subject demonstrates his command of bijinga alongside the yakusha-e for which he is principally remembered; like Utamaro, his contemporary and frequent stylistic rival, he supplied the Edo market with refined images of fashionable women in all seasons. The Metropolitan Museum of Art's recorded date of 1786 places the impression in Toyokuni's early independent career, before the Yakusha butai no sugata-e series of 1794-96 made him the leading designer in Edo, but already showing the disciplined draughtsmanship and pattern registration that defined the Utagawa school's house manner. The impression is preserved in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.