# A View of the Pleasures of the Taiko and His Five Wives at Rakuto > Kitagawa Utamaro - 1804 > Canonical HTML: https://iconotheca.com/artworks/kitagawa-utamaro/utamaro-taiko-five-wives-met/ > Published by Servola Systems GmbH. Last verified: 2026-09-18 ## Tombstone - **Artist:** Kitagawa Utamaro - **Date:** 1804 - **Medium:** Triptych of woodblock prints (oban format); ink and color on paper - **Dimensions:** 38.1 x 76.2 cm (15 x 30 in.), overall, three sheets joined - **Object type:** Print - **Period:** Japan, Edo period (1615-1868) - **Current location:** Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Department of Asian Art - **Attribution:** accepted ## Summary A triptych of full-color woodblock sheets, cut in 1804, showing the dead warlord Toyotomi Hideyoshi at the center of the cherry-blossom party he threw at Daigo-ji in the spring of 1598, ringed by the women of his household in the poses ukiyo-e normally reserved for courtesans. Within months of prints like it entering circulation, the Tokugawa shogunate arrested Kitagawa Utamaro and manacled him for fifty days for putting a named historical ruler, and the women around him, into the pleasure-quarter idiom. Utamaro was dead within two years.This impression has a plainer story after 1804: it belonged to the American painter Samuel Isham, and passed to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1914 as a gift of his estate, where it has been catalogued ever since as JP992. What is not plain, and what this record tries to be honest about, is whether this specific impression is one of the images the censors actually cited, or a surviving pull of a design that simply belongs to the same dangerous subject and the same year. ## Provenance Every link carries a grade. `documented` means a cited source supports it, `disputed` means the identification is argued but not established, `unknown` means we have no owner for that span and have not bridged it. - **1804** Kitagawa Utamaro (design); publisher not identified in the sources consulted `[documented]` (origin) Dated 1804 and attributed to Utamaro without dispute in the Metropolitan Museum's own catalogue record. - **undated** Unknown `[unknown]` (gap) No owner is documented between the print's creation in 1804 and its presence in Samuel Isham's New York collection by the time of his death in 1914. How and when this impression left Japan, and who held it in between, is not recorded in the sources consulted. - **-1914** Samuel Isham (1855-1914), New York `[documented]` (collection) Isham, an American portrait and figure painter, assembled a collection of Japanese color prints during his lifetime, reported at 236 prints in total. The date, dealer, or price for this specific impression is not documented in the sources consulted. - **1914-present** Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York `[documented]` (gift) Received as a gift of the Estate of Samuel Isham in 1914, per the Met's own credit line. Accession number JP992, object ID 37278. ## Open questions - Was this specific impression, Met JP992, among the images the Tokugawa censors actually cited in the 1804 prosecution, or is it a surviving pull of a closely related but distinct Utamaro design on the same Hideyoshi-and-cherry-blossoms subject? The subject matches the print described in secondary accounts of the case closely, but this record could not read the primary scholarly study (Davis, 2007) in full to confirm it image by image. - What specific edict or statute was invoked against Utamaro in 1804? Secondary sources agree the government's own case documents do not survive, which leaves the precise legal basis unrecoverable from what this record could access. - Did the fifty-day punishment contribute to Utamaro's death in 1806, or is the two-year interval coincidental? Widely repeated in popular sources as cause and effect; no source consulted here supplies a contemporary medical record or a named scholar making the causal argument in a peer-reviewed venue. - When, from whom, and under what circumstances did Samuel Isham acquire this impression? Not documented in the sources consulted for this record. - Was Utamaro's sentence fifty days of manacled house arrest outright, or three days of imprisonment followed by fifty days in handcuffs? Secondary accounts give both versions and this record could not resolve the discrepancy from a primary source. ## Sources - [1] Metropolitan Museum of Art, collection page for Kitagawa Utamaro, 'A View of the Pleasures of the Taiko and His Five Wives at Rakuto,' accession JP992. - [2] Metropolitan Museum of Art, Collection API, object record for object ID 37278 (accession number, credit line, medium, dimensions, classification, and public-domain status verified directly against this endpoint). - [3] Wikipedia, 'Utamaro,' for biography and the 1804 arrest, itself citing Julie Nelson Davis's 2007 study of the incident. Tertiary source; flagged for replacement with Davis's article and primary museum catalogues. - [4] Julie Nelson Davis, 'The trouble with Hideyoshi: censoring ukiyo-e and the Ehon Taikoki incident of 1804,' Japan Forum, vol. 19, no. 3 (2007), pp. 281-308. Existence and abstract verified; full text was paywalled and not read for this record. - [5] Art Institute of Chicago, Collection API, artwork 21530, 'Picture of Hideyoshi and his Five Wives Viewing Cherry Blossoms at Higashiyama (Taiko gosai rakuto yukan no zu),' including its own provenance text. - [6] Artelino, 'Utamaro Kitagawa - Punishment.' Tertiary popular source with no cited scholarly references; flagged for replacement. - [7] Wikipedia, 'Samuel Isham,' for biography and the bequest of his Japanese print collection to the Metropolitan Museum in 1914. Tertiary source; flagged for replacement with an obituary or the Met's own accession records. - [8] Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, collection record for their impression of the same design. Page title confirmed; full catalogue text could not be retrieved by this record's compilers (automated access returned no readable body content). - [9] ukiyo-e.org, aggregator record for the British Museum's impression of the same design. Tertiary aggregator; flagged for replacement with the British Museum's own catalogue record. - [10] Honolulu Museum of Art, collection record for their impression of the same design. Page title confirmed via search index; full catalogue text could not be retrieved by this record's compilers. - [11] Daigo-ji (temple), official website, event history for the 1598 Daigo no hanami cherry-blossom viewing. Institutional source with promotional framing; flagged for cross-check against a scholarly account of Hideyoshi's life. - [12] Wikipedia, 'Daigo-ji,' corroborating the 1598 Sanbo-in garden and the Daigo no hanami. Tertiary source; flagged for replacement with a scholarly account. --- Images on this record are public domain or CC0 and are hosted by us. No image on this site is generated or simulated. If you quote this record, quote the provenance grades with it.