Utamaro. Edmond de Goncourt

(Susuhaki), c. 1797–1799.

      Ōban pentatych, nishiki-e. The British Museum, London.

      “Courtesans Processing in Front of Stacked Boxes” (Tsumimono mae no yūjo), 1795. Ōban triptych, nishiki-e, right sheet: 37.5 × 24 cm; centre sheet: 37.5 × 23.7 cm; left sheet: 37.5 × 24.6 cm. Chiba City Museum of Art, Chiba.

      Procession of Children:

      A joyful march of children, one of whom carries an iron lance decorated with a tuft of feathers (work no doubt composed of five panels).

      Singers and Flowers of Edo:

      (work probably composed of five panels).

      Nishiki-e* in three panels

      Utamaro’s three-panel compositions, those triptychs so highly favoured by Japanese artists, are very numerous. These beautiful pages have, in the eyes of the educated collector, the seductive charm of the “art print”. They seem not to have suffered for having been massively reproduced mechanically. The designs of the great master seem to have kept, in their interpretation by the printer, their clarity, their lucidity, and their aqueous quality so reminiscent of the watercolour! When put side by side with modern prints, what a contrast between their harmonious greens, blues, reds, yellows, violets and these greens which assault the eyes, these harsh blues, these muddy reds, these ochre-tainted yellows, these calico violets! What an enormous difference between their luminosity and the dull, shallow look of these images in which the rough colourings look as though they were made with cheap powders.

      Let it suffice to cite this one example of The Dragonfly in the Poppies, for the Picture Book: Selected Insects (Illustrations 1, 2, 3, 4), not the print in the book, which is itself very beautiful in the early editions, but one of the very first proofs, a test proof, perhaps. This is not printing, this is a drawing in all its finesse and lightness, with the “human touch” aspect of a true drawing, rather than something reproduced many times over. In the same way this plate, showing two women and a little girl at the foot of a bridge, does not resemble so much a print as it does a watercolour, where the delicate relief of its embroidery, highlighted with a bit of gold, and its embossing, have become accessories to art. There are in these astonishing works so gentle a fading away of colour, and so tender a diffusion of their hues, that they appear to be the colours of a watercolour still wet from the artist’s brush, or the languidly luminous colours of Fragonard’s miniatures of children, dashed off on ivory medallions.

      In this enormous and incredible output of admirable prints, one must linger over these series with silver backgrounds, with mirrors before which women are dressing, mirrors with frames and little stands, lacquered in true lacquer. There are also those prints with a thousand details, with meticulous execution, rendered by a thousand tiny strokes, the roots of the lush hair on the temples and the forehead, that hair which in modern prints is but a jumbled, murky mass; and then those prints in which, in the silver coating of the backgrounds, adding to these images something like the reflection of pale moonlight, the women, with their discrete colouring, have skin the colour of tea-roses and appear in dresses of deep blue, currant red, or of a greenish golden yellow, dressed in colours of a delicacy unequalled in the coloured prints of any other country.

      Backgrounds always received great attention from Utamaro. He never gave his women the bare whiteness of the paper as a background, enveloping them sometimes in a straw yellow or orange with little clouds of dark, glistening mica dust to break its flatness, sometimes against a greyish shade, which in his work, has something of a beach, moistened by the sea, but from which it has retreated. Rather than leave his backgrounds blank, he made them undulate with a wave of a violet or tobacco shade. Sometimes, as in the series of which we have just spoken, the backgrounds around the figures show a silvery sheen such as might have been left by a snail, but which was made using silver or silver-white extracted from the ablet fish. His backgrounds may also have the look of oxidised metal, reminiscent of those in the works of his predecessor, Shiraku: bizarre, strange, surprising backgrounds, with daring colouring on metal, backgrounds which truly make one want to say that in these paper images, the painter wished to reproduce the multicoloured patina of Japanese bronzes. This search for what can be used to punctuate a background was so important and taken to such lengths of inventiveness in Utamaro’s work, that in one outstanding print, that of the Mother giving a warm Bath to her Child, the lower part of the plate is artistically dusted with ground charcoal, used in heating a bath.

      Some of these beautiful prints stand out by showing several different stages of the same composition. For example, in House-cleaning, there are three different versions of colouring: a first one, in which the contours outlined by the thinnest lines contain a combination of faded colours, almost entirely in the green and yellow range; a second, which introduces hints of blues and violets; and a third, with naturalistic colours, is still quite harmonious, but with a less distinctive polychromy.

      Another most curious print is The Princess, Having Left her Imperial Chariot, Walking in the Countryside. It is a print dominated by violet and which, in this first stage of colouring, seems to be an attempt by the printer to give the impression of a plate printed using gold, where all the tones are yellows or brownish yellow, against which the beautiful blacks of the lacquered wheels of the imperial chariot stand out sharply. In the second set, the results, which in fact were achieved by technical means through the thickness of the absorbent paper, reveal a deep colour which has penetrated and passed through the paper. Here, the major part of the colouring has been absorbed and held inside, and the only part of it which shows is that which shines through the silk of the Japanese paper, like colours under a glaze.

      But this is not all: there is in these prints a breaking down of the colour which further encourages the illusion of a watercolour-like wash, with hues broken by the brush, a decomposition brought on not only by air, sunlight, and exposure. This is an intentional diminishment, prepared in advance by substances mixed with the colours – herbal extracts, and trade secrets which have been lost but which have created such pale pinks, such deliciously yellow greens suggesting old moss, such languidly delicate blues and iridescent mauves: a decomposition which, in the flat areas, where colour is most important, brings about veinings, marblings, “agatisations”, like those seen in malachite, turquoise, and gem stones, and prepares those extraordinary underlying effects, so beautifully nuanced and almost shifting, which go beyond the immobility of a uniform tint, to enhance and complement the ornamentalism and the richness of a robe’s embroidery.