Lot 232F
After Utamaro Takamizawa Woodblocks, Pair
After Utamaro Takamizawa Woodblocks, Pair
Starting Bid: $150
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After Kitagawa Utamaro (Japanese, ca. 1753-1806), published by Takamizawa Mokuhansha, Tokyo. Two woodblock editions, ink and color on paper: (1) "Poppin wo Fuku Onna" (Young Woman Blowing a Poppin), from the series "Fujo Ninso Juppin" (Ten Types in the Physiognomic Study of Women), after the design of ca. 1792 to 1793; dated 1977; (2) "Ryogoku no Hanabi" (Fireworks at Ryogoku), the right sheet of a triptych, ca. 20th century CE.
A pair of woodblock sheets recutting two of Kitagawa Utamaro's most beloved images of women, issued in the twentieth century by the Takamizawa Mokuhansha of Tokyo, the workshop renowned for facsimiles of Edo masterpieces so exacting they echo the woodgrain of the originals. Both sheets carry the workshop's printed colophon, and the first bears a date of Showa 52, or 1977, placing them firmly in the modern hanga tradition rather than the eighteenth century. Taken together they offer, in a single lot, the two registers in which Utamaro defined the art of the beautiful woman: the intimate close-up and the riverside crowd. Size: Size (both the same): 10.6" W x 16" H (26.9 cm W x 40.6 cm H); of mattes: 13" W x 19" H (33.0 cm W x 48.3 cm H).
The first carries "The Young Woman Blowing a Poppin," the signature image of Utamaro's physiognomy series of about 1792 to 1793 and arguably the most widely circulated design in all of ukiyo-e. A poppin, also called bidoro or vidro after the Portuguese word for glass, was a thin blown-glass toy that flexed with a soft popping sound when breathed into, a novelty that reached Edo through the Nagasaki trade. Utamaro fused the new vogue for the okubi-e, the large-head bust portrait, with the popular practice of ninso, the reading of character from the face, and crowned the design with the conceit that he had drawn the sitter as a physiognomist would study her. The girl turns in a red-and-white checked robe, the glass toy at her lips, her expression caught between concentration and amusement, an image so fixed in the Japanese imagination that it has appeared on postage stamps and hangs in the Tokyo National Museum among others.
The second carries the right panel of a triptych set at Ryogoku Bridge, the great summer resort on the Sumida River where Edo gathered on warm evenings for the fireworks and the cool of the water. Three women occupy the foreground, one standing in a striped robe over an orange underdress, one drawing on a long kiseru pipe, a third leaning from a bench, while behind them the lantern-lit pleasure boats and the far embankment dissolve into a dusk sky. It is Utamaro in his expansive mode, the figures of the floating world set against the city's most celebrated nightscape. As products of the Takamizawa house, both sheets belong to a respected tradition of facsimile woodblock printing, openly credited to the carvers and printers who pulled them, and they present the connoisseur with two canonical Utamaro compositions in finely realized later impressions.
Kitagawa Utamaro (Japanese, ca. 1753-1806) stands among the supreme masters of the Japanese woodblock print, the artist who raised the image of the beautiful woman, the bijin, to its highest expression. Working chiefly under the great publisher Tsutaya Juzaburo, he pioneered the okubi-e, the large-head portrait that brought the sitter close enough to read mood and character in the turn of a wrist or the set of a mouth. His series of the 1790s, among them the physiognomic studies of women, fixed a vision of feminine grace that defined the floating world for his own era and shaped the European taste for ukiyo-e a century later, when his prints helped ignite the Japonisme that ran through Degas, Whistler, and the Impressionists.
Takamizawa Mokuhansha was a Tokyo woodblock house active across much of the twentieth century, esteemed for facsimiles of Edo-period masterworks executed with rare technical fidelity, exacting enough to echo the woodgrain and registration of the originals. Carved and printed by named artisans and openly credited in a colophon on each sheet, the firm's editions belong to a respected lineage of Japanese reproductive printing that preserved the carving and printing traditions of the old ukiyo-e workshops at a time when the original blocks and skills were vanishing. The house carried the designs of Utamaro, Hiroshige, Sharaku, and their peers to a modern audience, and its work is valued today as fine craftsmanship in its own right and as a faithful witness to images whose period impressions have become exceedingly rare.
Inscriptions:
Poppin wo Fuku Onna (Young Woman Blowing a Poppin): The printed cartouche at the upper right of the image carries the series title, "Fujo Ninso Juppin" (Ten Types in the Physiognomic Study of Women), followed by the signature "Sokan Utamaro koga" (physiognomic study, conceived and drawn by Utamaro). Directly below the signature are two small marks: the round "kiwame" seal (meaning "approved," the censor's mark) and the ivy-leaf-within-Fuji publisher mark of Tsutaya Juzaburo. A boxed colophon printed into the checked kimono gives the production credits: supervised by Takamizawa Tadao, carved by Kikuta Kojiro, printed by Kaneda Kyuichi, made in Showa 52 (1977).
Ryogoku no Hanabi (Fireworks at Ryogoku): The signature "Utamaro hitsu" (from the brush of Utamaro) appears at the left margin of the image, with a small "ge" character below it, a sequencing mark indicating the sheet's place within the triptych set. A boxed colophon at the lower margin gives the Takamizawa credits: a "fukkoku-ban" edition (recut woodblock), supervised by Takamizawa Tadao, with the carver and printer named alongside.
On the verso of the mattes: These are modern collector's captions, not part of the prints themselves. The label for the first reads "Poppin wo Fuku Onna" (Woman Blowing a Poppin), "Utamaro hitsu." The label for the second reads "Ryogoku no Hanabi" (Fireworks at Ryogoku), with the parenthetical note "right sheet of a triptych," "Utamaro hitsu."
Provenance: private Colorado, USA collection
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Item #
203117
- Condition: Fair. Both have foxing, discoloring, and stains in areas. Otherwise, imagery, inscriptions, and pigments are still clear. Both mounted in custom mattes. Some foxing and stains to mattes, as well as tattering to edges.
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