Seven Beautiful Women
About This Series
Kitagawa Utamaro's "Seven Beautiful Women" is the English title under which museum catalogues record sheets from one of the artist's bijin-ga sets organized around a roster of seven figures, the most likely source being his series gathering teahouse waitresses or named beauties of the late 1790s. The number seven had a productive currency in ukiyo-e mitate projects, deriving from the Seven Gods of Good Fortune, the Seven Komachi, and the Seven Sages, and Utamaro and his contemporaries frequently used it to organize comparative rosters of contemporary women. The sheets are oban tate-e in format and depict each figure at half-length or three-quarter length in the okubi-e mode that Utamaro had pioneered in his Tsutaya-era collaborations of 1792-1793, with the woman placed close to the picture plane against a plain or lightly toned ground that focuses attention on the modulation of facial expression and the rhythm of the hands. The series is generally dated to the mid-to-late 1790s and was published by one of Utamaro's regular publishers, most plausibly Tsutaya Juzaburo or one of the houses that took up his designs after Tsutaya's death in 1797. Each sheet identifies its figure by a cartouche giving her name or her role, and the comparative format invites the viewer to read across the seven women as a coherent ensemble. The set belongs to the broader category of bijin awase, the comparative beauty contest format that organized much of Utamaro's mature production, and demonstrates the consistent psychological register he brought to the genre. Impressions are catalogued in the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, the British Museum, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Tokyo National Museum.
Prints in This Series (1)
Frequently Asked Questions
Kitagawa Utamaro's "Seven Beautiful Women" is the English title under which museum catalogues record sheets from one of the artist's bijin-ga sets organized around a roster of seven figures, the most likely source being his series gathering teahouse waitresses or named beauties of the late 1790s. The number seven had a productive currency in ukiyo-e mitate projects, deriving from the Seven Gods of Good Fortune, the Seven Komachi, and the Seven Sages, and Utamaro and his contemporaries frequently used it to organize comparative rosters of contemporary women. The sheets are oban tate-e in format and depict each figure at half-length or three-quarter length in the okubi-e mode that Utamaro had pioneered in his Tsutaya-era collaborations of 1792-1793, with the woman placed close to the picture plane against a plain or lightly toned ground that focuses attention on the modulation of facial expression and the rhythm of the hands. The series is generally dated to the mid-to-late 1790s and was published by one of Utamaro's regular publishers, most plausibly Tsutaya Juzaburo or one of the houses that took up his designs after Tsutaya's death in 1797. Each sheet identifies its figure by a cartouche giving her name or her role, and the comparative format invites the viewer to read across the seven women as a coherent ensemble. The set belongs to the broader category of bijin awase, the comparative beauty contest format that organized much of Utamaro's mature production, and demonstrates the consistent psychological register he brought to the genre. Impressions are catalogued in the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, the British Museum, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Tokyo National Museum.
The Seven Beautiful Women series contains 1 prints, created by Kitagawa Utamaro.
The Seven Beautiful Women series was created by Kitagawa Utamaro (喜多川歌麿).
We currently have 1 of 1 known prints from the Seven Beautiful Women series indexed in our collection. Browse them all on this page.
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