File:Utamakura 歌まくら (Poem of the Pillow) (BM OA+,0.133.12 2).jpg

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Utamakura 歌まくら (Poem of the Pillow)   (Wikidata search (Cirrus search) Wikidata query (SPARQL)  Create new Wikidata item based on this file)
Artist

Print artist: Kitagawa Utamaro (喜多川歌麿)

Published by: Tsutaya Juzaburo (蔦屋重三郎)
Title
Utamakura 歌まくら (Poem of the Pillow)
Description
English: Shunga, colour woodblock print. No. 12 out of 12 illustrations from a printed folding album (sheets mounted separately). Elderly Dutch couple.
Date 1788 (New Year, preface)
Medium paper
Dimensions
Height: 25.50 centimetres (ca.)
Width: 37 centimetres (ca.)
institution QS:P195,Q6373
Current location
Asia
Accession number
OA+,0.133.12
Notes This image, from a standard set of twelve, is unusual in showing international sex, even two Europeans together, rather than the more often encountered Western male with a Japanese female (Clark et al 2013, cat. nos. 117, 119). It is also one of the earliest such images; the date is important because it confirms that the set was produced while the Dutch East India Company was still making its annual trips to Edo, to pay respects to the shogun. Since these took place in the spring, ‘Dutch’ and ‘spring’ were regarded as linked terms. In associative poetry, for example, they invoke each other. The spring connotation made Westerners a good fit with shunga (‘spring pictures’), but nevertheless, there are relatively few such images. The members of the Company were government guests and as such it would not have been politic to depict them too wantonly. This explains why almost all representations of European sex post-date the termination of the annual Dutch trip to Edo in 1790. Although we cannot suppose this image to be a portrait, it is possible that Utamaro witnessed one of the company visits. That of 1788 (the date of this album) was led by Johan, Baron van Rheede (the only titled European to visit Japan until Count Tolstoy came on a Russian ship in 1804). The man’s wind-chiselled face does seem to attest to a more empirical gaze than that of the woman, who unlike him is anachronistically dressed. Almost no European women came to Japan until the brief visit in 1817 of Titia Bersman, wife of the head of the Company trading factory, Jan Cock Blomhoff, with her sister and an Indonesian maid (see Clark et al 2013, pp. 390–3). This is a particularly strong example of the tendency of shunga to dispose of the body, and concentrate only on the genitals and the heads. [TS]
Source/Photographer https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/A_OA-0-133-12
Permission
(Reusing this file)		 © The Trustees of the British Museum, released as CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
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current20:51, 12 May 2020Thumbnail for version as of 20:51, 12 May 20201,600 × 1,108 (240 KB)Copyfraud (talk | contribs)British Museum public domain uploads (Copyfraud/BM) Eroticism in the British Museum 1788 image 3 of 3 #1,434/1,471

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