Seven Komachis of Yoshiwara
About This Series
Kitagawa Utamaro's "Seven Komachis of Yoshiwara" (Yoshiwara nana komachi) is one of the artist's mid-career bijin-ga projects, transposing the canonical seven episodes from the life of the ninth-century court poet Ono no Komachi onto contemporary courtesans of the licensed quarter. The Komachi cycle, codified in medieval no plays such as Sotoba Komachi and Kayoi Komachi, had a long history in ukiyo-e mitate, where each scene from the poet's hagiography was paired with a present-day equivalent drawn from the floating world. Utamaro's series, published by Tsutaya Juzaburo and generally dated to around 1793-1794, recasts the seven episodes by identifying each with a named Yoshiwara courtesan whose situation parodies that of the classical poet, an exercise that flattered the literary pretensions of the educated chonin audience while serving as a fashion catalogue of the leading houses. The prints are issued in oban tate-e format and display the half-length okubi-e bijin compositions that the artist had pioneered in the early 1790s in collaboration with Tsutaya, with the courtesan placed close to the picture plane against a plain ground that concentrates attention on the modulation of facial expression. Each sheet bears the series cartouche and the identifying inscription naming the Komachi episode and the courtesan, and the literary reference is carried by costume motif, accessory, and inscribed poem rather than by explicit narrative cues, in keeping with the suggestive logic of the mitate format. The series belongs to the height of Utamaro's collaboration with Tsutaya, the moment at which his bijin-ga effectively redefined how the late-eighteenth-century courtesan portrait would look. Impressions are scarce and are held in the major Utamaro collections at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, the British Museum, the Tokyo National Museum, and the Chiba City Museum of Art, where the series figures in the standard cataloguing of his Tsutaya-era production at the height of his career.
Prints in This Series (2)
Frequently Asked Questions
Kitagawa Utamaro's "Seven Komachis of Yoshiwara" (Yoshiwara nana komachi) is one of the artist's mid-career bijin-ga projects, transposing the canonical seven episodes from the life of the ninth-century court poet Ono no Komachi onto contemporary courtesans of the licensed quarter. The Komachi cycle, codified in medieval no plays such as Sotoba Komachi and Kayoi Komachi, had a long history in ukiyo-e mitate, where each scene from the poet's hagiography was paired with a present-day equivalent drawn from the floating world. Utamaro's series, published by Tsutaya Juzaburo and generally dated to around 1793-1794, recasts the seven episodes by identifying each with a named Yoshiwara courtesan whose situation parodies that of the classical poet, an exercise that flattered the literary pretensions of the educated chonin audience while serving as a fashion catalogue of the leading houses. The prints are issued in oban tate-e format and display the half-length okubi-e bijin compositions that the artist had pioneered in the early 1790s in collaboration with Tsutaya, with the courtesan placed close to the picture plane against a plain ground that concentrates attention on the modulation of facial expression. Each sheet bears the series cartouche and the identifying inscription naming the Komachi episode and the courtesan, and the literary reference is carried by costume motif, accessory, and inscribed poem rather than by explicit narrative cues, in keeping with the suggestive logic of the mitate format. The series belongs to the height of Utamaro's collaboration with Tsutaya, the moment at which his bijin-ga effectively redefined how the late-eighteenth-century courtesan portrait would look. Impressions are scarce and are held in the major Utamaro collections at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, the British Museum, the Tokyo National Museum, and the Chiba City Museum of Art, where the series figures in the standard cataloguing of his Tsutaya-era production at the height of his career.
The Seven Komachis of Yoshiwara series contains 1 prints, created by Kitagawa Utamaro.
The Seven Komachis of Yoshiwara series was created by Kitagawa Utamaro (喜多川歌麿).
We currently have 2 of 1 known prints from the Seven Komachis of Yoshiwara series indexed in our collection. Browse them all on this page.
Want to rate prints from Seven Komachis of Yoshiwara?
Sign up to start rating