Price available upon request. This piece is currently being reviewed for museum acquisition; serious inquiries from private collectors welcome.
Periwinkle silk that pools to the floor, wide sleeved and worn open like a robe. Down the back a painted bijin geisha in red and blue kimonos and artist's signature. A long Japanese-style silk robe printed with ukiyo-e beauty art, the bijin-ga tradition of painted women. Decorative and artful.
The history of the style: Bijin-ga (美人画), literally "pictures of beautiful women," is one of the great subject categories of ukiyo-e, the woodblock print tradition of Japan's Edo period (1603–1868). Rather than portraits of specific individuals, bijin-ga idealized femininity itself, courtesans of the Yoshiwara pleasure quarters, geisha, and teahouse women were rendered through elaborate kimono, elegant posture, and stylized beauty, each artist bringing his own vision of the ideal woman to the genre.
No artist shaped bijin-ga more than Kitagawa Utamaro (c. 1753–1806). In the early 1790s, Utamaro pioneered the ōkubi-e ("large-head picture") format — close-up, half-length portraits that had never been done in ukiyo-e before. Where earlier bijin-ga favored full-figure, formally posed women, Utamaro zoomed in and captured intimate, candid emotion: a tilt of the head, a private gesture, a private moment between geisha at rest rather than performing. His work was controversial enough to draw government censorship (his ōkubi-e style was banned in 1800, and he was jailed briefly in 1804) but it was this very innovation that made him the genre's most celebrated name, later championed abroad by Western collectors and credited with helping define how Japanese art was received in Europe.
The reading down the back panel: 「哥麿筆」, "[Uta]maro hitsu," or "brush of Utamaro," is the traditional signature format used to credit a bijin-ga work to its artist. On a printed silk robe like this one, that signature is reproduced as part of the decorative design rather than an original hand-painted inscription. a nod to Utamaro's legacy and the bijin-ga tradition. Long silk robes printed with this kind of ukiyo-e imagery were a popular decorative export item through the mid-to-late 20th century, bringing the aesthetic of Edo-period woodblock art into a wearable, everyday form.
Estimated era: late 20th century.
Age: likely 35 to 45 years, read from the silk and print style.
Measurements: Length 55".
Materials: 100% Silk.
Model is a size 4 (S/M), 5'11", 26" waist, 38.5" hips.
Carrying the soft patina that only time can give; significant flaws are always detailed above.
