Kitagawa Utamaro (1753-1806) | Yamauba and Kintaro | Edo period, late 18th - early 19th century

Wakai Kanzaburo (1834-1908)

Hayashi Tadamasa (1854-1906)

Heinz Kaempfer (1904-1986)

With eyes locked with one another, Yamauba nurses the young Kintaro who wears a robe decorated with stylised clouds. In mythology, Yamauba is a fearsome devil woman believed to live with her son Kintaro (Kaido-maru) on the isolated slopes of Mount Ashigara. In his work however, Utamaro always portrays her as a beautiful woman looking after her mischievous infant son who possessed supernatural strength and is traditionally depicted with bright red skin. Although other artists also produced designs on this subject, as many as fifty works by Utamaro are known, far exceeding those by other artists. Ranging from the humurous, sentimental and erotically charged, the reasons for Utamaro’s high output on this subject are not clear but for the subject generally it has been proposed that the public must have responded well to it, thereby creating sufficient demand. Another possibility is that this subject would have been safe from censorship by the authorities, which might have made the subject attractive from the publisher’s perspective. See Shugo Asano and Timothy Clark, The Passionate Art of Kitagawa Utamaro, (London, 1995), nos. 386-91, pp. 226-227.