Man Strolling with a Boy Carrying Flowering Branch

A full-length nikuhitsu [ukiyo-e](/glossary/ukiyo-e) hanging scroll by Kitagawa Fujimaro, pupil of Kitagawa Utamaro, datable to around 1810. A young man walks at the front of the composition, accompanied by a boy attendant carrying branches of flowering plum, a seasonal motif that anchors the image in early spring and signals the wider iconographic frame of the painting. The accompanying inscribed poem above the figures exploits the standard Edo pun on iro, the Japanese word that means both 'colour' and 'love', and stages a comparison between the cherry blossom and the plum: the cherry, the painting's poem suggests, stands for the mature courtesans of Edo's Yoshiwara pleasure quarter, while the plum is assigned to young men, those handsome youths whose beauty - the poem implies - should not be overlooked in romantic pursuits. The conceit is characteristic of the homoerotic strand of Edo cultural production that ran through both the male-male pleasure quarter (kagema-jaya) of the Yoshiwara periphery and through the homo-social poetic networks of the Edo kyoka circles. Fujimaro's brushwork in the figure is tighter than Utamaro's late style, the contour carried at an even weight from the throat down through the elaborate folds of the kosode, and the muted palette - mineral colour and ink wash over a silk ground - is characteristic of the restrained chromatic register Edo nikuhitsu painters favoured in the first decades of the nineteenth century. The scroll is preserved at the Cleveland Museum of Art (accession 1985.256), part of the Kelvin Smith Collection given to the museum by Mrs Kelvin Smith. Overall mount dimensions are 180.4 by 48.3 cm, with the painting itself measuring 94 by 31 cm. The work is one of the principal documents of Fujimaro's mature nikuhitsu ukiyo-e style.