Kitagawa Utamaro (喜多川歌麿) (artist ca 1753 – 1806)
Married man and widow with a smoking set beside them from the series Unraveling the Threads of Desire (Negai no ito-guchi - ねがいの糸口)
1799
14.25 in x 9.75 in (Overall dimensions) Japanese woodblock print
British Museum
Metropolitan Museum of Art
Rijksmuseum
Rijksmuseum - same print, same date, but the man is wearing a green robe The curatorial comments from the British Museum read: "Negai no itoguchi is the second of the three great sets of shunga prints by Utamaro, published eleven years after his early triumph with Utamakura (Poem of the Pillow; Shunga...). In the intervening years the artist’s style matured and became, if anything, even more voluptuous. (The third set would be Ehon Komachi-biki [Picture Book: Pulling Komachi], of 1802.)"
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Illustrated:
1) in 'Performing female roles of the Floating World in Utamaro's Negai no itoguchi' by Manuela Coldesina and Giulia Baquè in Andon 108, December, 2019, p. 11.
2) in color in Women in shunga: Questions of Objectification and Equality by Louise Boyd, the Polish Journal of Aesthetics, 4/2019, page 84.
erotic prints (shunga - 春画) (genre)