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The Courtesan Takigawa of the Ogi Establishment with Her Child Attendants Yoshino and Tatsuta beside an Iris Pond

The Courtesan Takigawa of the Ogi Establishment with Her Child Attendants Yoshino and Tatsuta beside an Iris Pond

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Utagawa Toyokuni

This color woodcut depicts bijin, a Japanese word that means “beautiful person” but is customarily used to describe women. Bijin were popular subjects in Japanese prints during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Woodcuts of bijin typically feature women wearing beautifully patterned kimonos and elegant hairstyles. The colorful woodcuts glamorize these women’s lives and their profession as commercialized sex workers, bound by contract to licensed brothels and trained from a young age to please and entertain patrons. Like the theatres and pleasure districts of Japan’s early modern cities, prints of celebrity actors and courtesans indulged viewers’ fantasies of glamour and desire.
Artist
Utagawa Toyokuni
(Japanese, 1769 - 1825)
Title
The Courtesan Takigawa of the Ogi Establishment with Her Child Attendants Yoshino and Tatsuta beside an Iris Pond
Date
1795-1800
Medium
Color woodcut
Dimensions
324 x 225 mm Overall
Credit
Bequest of John H. Van Vleck
Accession No.
1980.3169
Classification
Prints
Geography
Japan

Related

1917, purchased from Lucy F. Brown (New York, NY) by Edward Burr Van Vleck (Madison, WI); 1943, passed through inheritance to Edward’s son, John H. Van Vleck (Madison, WI); 9 January 1980, bequeathed by John H. Van Vleck to the Elvehjem Museum of Art [now called Chazen Museum of Art]

  • Mueller, Laura. "Competition and Collaboration: Japanese Prints of the Utagawa School." Leiden, The Netherlands: Hotei Publishing, 2007. p. 96, no. 58
  • Elvehjem Museum of Art. "The Edward Burr Van Vleck Collection of Japanese Prints." Madison: Elvehjem Museum of Art, 1990. p. 329

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