駒形の朝霧 Komagata no asagiri (Morning Mist at Komagata), Utagawa Kuniyoshi

Archive Label date unknown: Kuniyoshi was famous for his prints of actors, animals, and illustrations of historical tales. His few landscapes were on par with those of Hiroshige. Like his follower Yoshitoshi (1839-1892), Kuniyoshi had a taste for the bizarre and unusual. His prints were so popular that young men often had his designs tattooed onto their bodies. Here, a woman of dubious reputation tightens her sash as she wends her way home in th early hours of the morning. One person, the rider in the palanquin, has already arisen and set off for the day. The woman holds her tenugui, similar to a modern day hand towel or handkerchief, in her mouth. Holding objects in the mouth was considered extremely uncouth, but such depictions were often included in prints for their sexual innuendo. Archive Label Sept-May 1993: As woodblock prints became increasingly popular in the Edo period (1600-1868), artists used more expensive materials and created larger, costlier prints. Because government officials, who tightly controlled many aaspects of daily life, felt taht people were spending too much money on the more expensive prints, they passed laws regulating production that included restrictions on the sizes. To circumvent the law, some artists worked in diptych (two part), triptych (three part) or larger multiple formats so that they could technically comply with the smaller size limitations. This print was designed to be the right panel of a triptych. Earlier Japanese prints of women tended to idealize feminine beauty. In Kuniyoshi's work, as well as that of other artists of the nineteenth century, such idealization in minimized. This less romantic view of women, as well as the simplification and interest in contours and silhouettes present in the background of this print, is also evident in some French art.