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Your galleryWoman Exhaling Smoke from a Pipe, from the series "Ten Classes of Women’s Physiognomy (Fujo ninso juppon)"
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Look at the long pipe balanced in her fingers, her pursed lips, and her hair loosely tied with a white ribbon.
This half-length woman comes from Ten Classes of Women’s Physiognomy, a series of about 1792 to 1793 that, the Cleveland Museum of Art explains, assigns traits of character to women from their looks. Her loose robe falls open as she breathes out smoke from a long, thin pipe; smoking tobacco was a fashion in eighteenth-century Edo. Close-up portraits like this were what Utamaro was best known for.
Color woodblock print; oban · 38.8 × 25.3 cm · Art Institute of Chicago
Read more at the Art Institute of Chicago
Sources
- Art Institute of Chicago: Woman Exhaling Smoke from a Pipe, from the series "Ten Classes of Women’s Physiognomy (Fujo ninso juppon)"
- Cleveland Museum of Art: The Flirtatious Type, from Ten Types in the Physiognomy of Women
- Cleveland Museum of Art: Takigawa of the Ōgiya from the series A Selection of Eastern Beauties
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Details and source
- Museum title
- Woman Exhaling Smoke from a Pipe, from the series "Ten Classes of Women’s Physiognomy (Fujo ninso juppon)"
- Artist
- Kitagawa Utamaro 喜多川 歌麿 Japanese, c.1753-1806
- Date
- c. 1792/93
- Medium
- Color woodblock print; oban
- Dimensions
- 38.8 × 25.3 cm (15 5/16 × 10 in.)
- Credit line
- Clarence Buckingham Collection
- Image license
- CC0 1.0 · Public domain
- Museum record
- Art Institute of Chicago
Ukiyo-e c. 1600–1900
View in the AtlasGaller’s rooms and hanging scale are imagined. The image is the museum’s original digital reproduction.