Couple with a Standing Screen

Almost everything in this print is seen through something else. A young man leans on a tsuitate, a free-standing screen of the kind set out in a Japanese room in summer, its middle panel filled with gauze to let the air through. His light summer jacket of sheer black silk, dotted with white, hangs over the top of the screen, and the young woman crouching beside him looks out through that fabric, her face and hair showing faintly behind it. Lower down, the man's own body appears only as a shadow behind the gauze of the screen. Utamaro designed the sheet around 1797 for the Edo publisher Moriya Jihei, and the effect depended on the carvers of the woodblocks, who had to cut the tiny dots of the jacket finely enough for the face beneath to come through. This is one impression from the edition, and the museum owns two. This one belonged to the collector Charles B. Eddy before the Boston brothers William and John Spaulding bought it in 1920. They gave it to the museum the following year.