context: painting > prints > subjects

an Utamaro courtesan

Beautiful Women

Women, especially courtesans (high class prostitutes - those cruising the waterfront for johns were not generally painted), were perhaps the most successful subject for most of the history of Japanese prints, and the subject for a lot of the greatest works. I discuss the relationship of the works to the subjects in Portraiture in the general comments painting strand: the idea that these weren't portraits of particular women but of types, and the courtesans' roles were probably more like those of models in fashion mags today - a work entitled by a famous courtesan's name was more about showing how someone like that did her hair and what she was wearing these days than it was about her actual appearance. If you look at the brevity with which the face was indicated, and observe that almost all of the variation in body shape is with the changing artistic fashions (this decade, women are all tall and slim...), it's hard to believe that the specific woman in question was much to do with the print. I've not seen anything to suggest any certainty that the artists always knew or had even necessarily ever seen the women they depicted.

There are many examples of images of courtesans painting, and this was among the skills expected of them - but I've not seen any examples of art by courtesans anywhere.

forwards: sex