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One of the most famous of the ukiyo-e artists, Kitagawa Utamaro began working as an artist in the 1770s and rose to prominence in the 1790s. He was best known for his bijin ōkubi-e or “large-headed pictures of beautiful women,” which were portraits with exaggerated, elongated features. His work had a profound influence on well-known contemporary European Impressionists such as Mary Cassatt. After a successful career that included the production of more than two thousand prints, Utamaro was arrested in 1804 for making illegal prints depicting the 16th-century military ruler Toyotomi Hideyoshi. As punishment, he was forced to wear shackles for fifty days. Possibly as a result of this harsh treatment, he died two years later.Label Type
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Utamaro’s series “Ten Classes of Women’s Physiognomy” claimed to identify the different types of women, buying into the pseudoscience of physiognomy, the supposed art of judging a person’s personality and character from facial features. This print lacks a title, which would typically be in the middle section of the cartouche on the right, but it has been given the descriptive name Woman Reading a Letter by scholars. The subject’s shaved eyebrows and blackened teeth indicate that she is a married woman; the intent way in which she is reading the letter, as well as the common themes of ukiyo-e (pleasure, entertainment, and drama), suggest that she is reading a love letter. Additionally, this print features the technique of dusting ground mica on the background of a print. The white ground mica (shiro-kirazuri) on this print gives off a breathtaking pearlescent shimmer.