Women Making Clothing

Women Making Clothing is a bijin-ga design by Utagawa Toyokuni in the Cleveland Museum of Art. While Toyokuni's renown rests above all on his yakusha-e portraits, the production of Edo ukiyo-e regularly included scenes of women engaged in textile work, and the artist contributed his share of such images. The making and finishing of clothing was a recurrent theme: cutting fabric on the wooden chest, sewing, ironing, and stretching cloth on the bamboo frames known as shinshi were all activities that gave visual artists a richly textured set of motions and props. Toyokuni's composition shows several women cooperating on a task associated with garment preparation, the patterned cloth and household tools providing the structural framework of the scene. The figures are observed with the calm grace characteristic of his late-eighteenth-century bijin-ga, attentive to the dignity of skilled domestic labor as well as to the elegance of dress and hairstyle. The Cleveland Museum of Art catalogues this impression with the date 1790, used here from the museum record. As a document of women's daily working life in late-eighteenth-century Edo, the print supplements both Toyokuni's actor portraits and his more leisurely bijin-ga compositions, illustrating the breadth of subject matter that Edo ukiyo-e designers could draw from the surrounding urban world.