A Courtesan on Her Way to the Teahouse: Utagawa Toyoharu in Paint | 歌川豊春 肉筆画

Utagawa Toyoharu (歌川豊春) was the founder of the Utagawa school, the teacher of Toyokuni and Toyohiro, and the artist who opened the door to Western perspective in ukiyo-e. This large-scale painting in full color on paper, dated 1763, is an outstanding example of his artistry, and perhaps the finest of the roughly one hundred works by the artist known today.

The scene shows a high-ranking courtesan setting out with her two attendants to meet a wealthy client at a teahouse of the Yoshiwara. Beside her, a figure carries a great lantern marked with a family crest. The courtesan's full, graceful figure is characteristic of Toyoharu's style in this period, and her magnificent outer robe bears a design of crashing waves, a theme repeated on the robe of the attendant walking before her.

At over 124 by 55.5 centimeters, the sheet commands the room like a hanging scroll in a grand interior. Toyoharu's background is little documented: he is thought to have studied with the Kano-school painter Tsuruzawa Tangai, and to have moved to Edo around 1763, where he studied under Shigenaga and Sekien. From there he went on to develop the uki-e, the perspective print that made him famous, and he retired from designing prints in the 1780s.

Seeing the master's early work in painting form is a rare pleasure: before the perspective prints and before the Utagawa school's rise, Toyoharu was already drawing women of commanding presence, their robes patterned with the sea itself. It is a document of the artist's craft at its most ambitious, in full color on paper, in its prime condition of about 1780.