A View of the Pleasures of the Taiko and His Five Wives at Rakuto

Three oban sheets, printed in full color and meant to be read as one continuous scene, show Toyotomi Hideyoshi seated at the center of an outdoor party under blossoming cherry trees, surrounded by women of his household in elaborate dress. The Metropolitan Museum catalogues the subject plainly as Hideyoshi and his five wives viewing cherry blossoms; other institutions holding impressions of the same design render the title as a picture of Hideyoshi and his five wives viewing cherry blossoms at Higashiyama, the hills on Kyoto's eastern edge. The overall sheet measures 38.1 by 76.2 centimeters as mounted at the Met, though an impression of the same design at the Art Institute of Chicago is trimmed slightly smaller, at 36.6 by 73.5 centimeters, which is ordinary for woodblock sheets cut down at different points in their history rather than evidence of a different print.

The design belongs to Utamaro's late, ambitious phase: large-format, multi-figure, full-color triptychs rather than the single-sheet half-length portraits of beauties that had made his name in the early 1790s. It is not a fantasy scene. Every element in it points to one specific, datable historical event.

In the spring of 1598 Toyotomi Hideyoshi, the warlord who had unified Japan under his rule, held an enormous cherry-blossom viewing party at Daigo-ji, a temple southeast of Kyoto, centered on the Sanbo-in sub-temple and its garden, which he had had rebuilt for the occasion. Daigo-ji's own institutional history states that some seven hundred cherry trees were planted for the event and that roughly thirteen hundred guests attended, including Hideyoshi's son Hideyori, his wife, and his mistresses; Wikipedia's account of the temple corroborates that the Sanbo-in garden was laid out under Hideyoshi in 1598 for what is called the Daigo no hanami, the Daigo flower viewing. Hideyoshi died a few months later, in the autumn of 1598, which makes the party one of the last great public displays of his rule rather than an incidental garden party.

That is the historical scene Utamaro's triptych restages, roughly two hundred years after the fact, with Hideyoshi's household rendered in the visual language of the Yoshiwara pleasure quarter.

Hideyoshi was not a safely distant historical figure to the Tokugawa shogunate that governed Japan in 1804. The Tokugawa house had defeated the faction loyal to Hideyoshi's heir at Sekigahara in 1600 and finally extinguished the Toyotomi line at the siege of Osaka Castle in 1615; the dynasty that commissioned the censorship of this print was, in a direct sense, the dynasty that had unmade the one Hideyoshi founded. A wave of popular affection for Hideyoshi as a folk hero, expressed through cheap illustrated books, prints, and the kabuki and joruri stage, put a rival political memory back into circulation in a form the government did not control.

Utamaro's triptych does not merely depict Hideyoshi. By setting him among women posed as courtesans and, by scholarly account, naming each of them, it flattens a state-founding warlord into ukiyo-e subject matter, exactly the kind of casual, marketable familiarity the shogunate's censors treated as disrespect.

The proximate cause of the wave of Hideyoshi prints, including this one, was the Ehon Taikoki, an illustrated chronicle of Hideyoshi's life published between 1797 and 1802, which was adapted for the kabuki and joruri stage between 1799 and 1804. Its popularity created a commercial appetite for Hideyoshi-themed prints and books that a number of artists and publishers moved to satisfy. Utamaro was one of several leading print designers who answered that appetite directly.

In the early summer of 1804 the shogunate moved against the artists and publishers who had capitalized on the Ehon Taikoki vogue. Utamaro was manacled for fifty days alongside the print designers Kitagawa Tsukimaro, Utagawa Toyokuni, Katsukawa Shuntei and Katsukawa Shun'ei, and the writer Jippensha Ikku; their publishers were fined heavily, and the Ehon Taikoki itself was banned and its stock confiscated. Secondary accounts differ on the exact shape of Utamaro's own punishment: some state fifty days of manacled house arrest outright, others describe three days of imprisonment followed by fifty days in handcuffs. This record could not resolve which is correct from a primary source and flags the discrepancy rather than picking one.

The offense, as later scholarship reconstructs it, was identifying named historical and contemporary figures of rank, and using their crests, in commercial prints, which the Tokugawa authorities treated as a form of lese-majeste toward the political order rather than as harmless entertainment; this sat inside a longer-running body of Edo-period sumptuary and publishing restriction that had already targeted current-events reporting, unorthodox opinion, and extravagant printing since at least the Kyoho era of the early eighteenth century, and had been tightened again in the Kansei reforms of the 1790s. Wikipedia's account of Utamaro, drawing on the art historian Julie Nelson Davis's 2007 study of the incident, states plainly that the government's own documents from the 1804 prosecution do not survive. That means the precise article or edict invoked in Utamaro's case is not recoverable from the record as this record's compilers were able to access it, and it is stated here as an open question rather than papered over.

Multiple Hideyoshi subjects by Utamaro circulated in this period, not one. Secondary accounts of the 1804 prosecution, again drawing on Davis's research, describe at least three distinct censored images: Kato Kiyomasa watching Korean dancers at a party, Hideyoshi shown holding hands with his page Ishida Mitsunari in a sexually suggestive manner, and Hideyoshi viewing cherry blossoms with his five consorts at Daigo-ji, each consort identified by name and posed in the manner of a courtesan. That third description matches the subject of this triptych closely: Hideyoshi, five women of his household, a cherry-blossom party at the historical Daigo location.

What this record cannot do is confirm, from a source it was able to read in full, that the Metropolitan's own impression, JP992, is a surviving pull of that specific censored image rather than a separate but closely related Utamaro design on the same subject and from the same year. The scholarly account that would settle this, Davis's 2007 Japan Forum article, was only accessible here as an abstract; its full text, and the primary Bakufu-era sources it discusses, were not read. This record therefore states the connection as probable, on the strength of subject match, and not as established fact.

Utamaro died on 31 October 1806, a little over two years after his release from manacles, at around fifty-two or fifty-three years old. Popular accounts of his life routinely state that the arrest broke his health or his spirit and caused his death; several of the sources consulted for this record repeat that claim in similar language. None of them, including the ones that present it most confidently, cite a contemporary medical record, a documented cause of death, or a named scholar making the causal case in a peer-reviewed venue. The two-year gap is real and documented. Whether it is cause and effect, or two unrelated facts sitting next to each other in a short biography, is treated here as unresolved.

Samuel Isham (1855-1914) was an American portrait and figure painter, trained first in law at Columbia before he left legal practice for art and studied at the Academie Julian in Paris in the mid-1880s. He was elected to the National Academy of Design in 1906, won a silver medal at the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair, served on the art jury of the 1901 Pan-American Exposition, and in 1905 published The History of American Painting, his best-known written work. He died in 1914 of an aneurysm on the golf course of the Maidstone Club in East Hampton, New York.

Isham was also a collector of Japanese color prints. On his death his estate gave a substantial group of them, reported at 236 prints, to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, of which this triptych is one. The sources consulted for this record do not document when, from whom, or at what price Isham acquired this specific impression; his broader collecting activity and its place in the wave of American collecting of Japanese prints in this period would need separate research to establish.

Woodblock printing pulls many impressions from the same carved blocks, and this design survives in more than one public collection, which matters for keeping this specific object straight from its siblings. The Art Institute of Chicago holds an impression in the Clarence Buckingham Collection, with a documented modern provenance through the Paris dealer Charles Jacquin, sold at the Walpole Galleries in New York in January 1921 to Kate Sturges Buckingham, who gave it to the museum in 1925. The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the Honolulu Museum of Art each hold an impression under close variants of the same title, and an impression is recorded at the British Museum as well, through the online aggregator ukiyo-e.org. None of these is the Met's impression, JP992, and none of the catalogue text for those other holdings beyond their own titles and institutional attribution could be independently confirmed by this record's compilers; they are named here as the documented comparandum group, not described in further detail than that.

This record is built from the Metropolitan Museum's own collection data, from Wikipedia's account of Utamaro (itself drawing on a peer-reviewed 2007 study this record could not read in full), and from a handful of institutional catalogue pages for related impressions that returned only a title and a holding institution to automated retrieval. The precise edict invoked against Utamaro, the exact terms of his sentence, whether this exact impression was among the censored images, and the medical or circumstantial facts of his death two years later are all treated here as open rather than resolved, because that is what the sources available to this record actually support.