Window mode follows your eyes with your camera, in this browser only: no picture or position leaves your device.
Moonlight Revelry at Dozo Sagami
Kitagawa Utamaro 喜多川歌麿 (1753-1806)
late 18th- early 19th century
- Medium
- Ink and color on paper
- Classification
- Paintings
- Dimensions
- H x W (image): 147.4 x 321 cm (58 1/16 x 126 3/8 in)
- Culture
- Japanese
- Museum
- Smithsonian Institution, National Museum of Asian Art
- Credit line
- Gift of Charles Lang Freer
- Rights
- CC0 (Smithsonian Open Access), as the museum states it.
- Who can see it
- Tweens profiles and older: its subjects are known and suit older children. How works are placed
View at the Smithsonian Institution
About this work
Utamaro is known mainly for his sumptuous woodblock prints portraying women. Moonlight Revelry, a masterpiece among his few paintings, once formed a set of three on the themes of "Snow," "Moon," and "Flower." This painting shows the spacious salon of an elite pleasure house located in Shinagawa, once a suburb of Edo (now Tokyo), the center of the shogun's government. Here Utamaro used principles of European perspective, which had begun to be incorporated into Japanese art during the eighteenth century, to depict a dramatic architectural setting while maintaining the elevated viewpoint of traditional Japanese painting.
