For thou hast enmity toward all
The servants of life's breath;
One mistress holdeth thee in thrall,
And them thou lovest who her call
Answer; and she is Death.
. . . . . .
Now Death thy ruined city's streets
Walketh, a grisly queen.
And there her sacred horror greets
Him who invades these waste retreats,
Her sacrosanct demesne—
In robes like clouds at sunset rolled
About the dying sun,
In splendid vestments of purple and gold
That a thousand perished years have spun
For her, the Imperial One.
Utamaro, the central and in some ways the most fascinating figure of this period, has been from the first a great favourite in the esteem of European collectors. His graceful, sinuous women are the images that come most readily to the minds of many people at the mention of Japanese prints. In his own time and land his popularity was equalled by that of no other artist.
UTAMARO.
It was by his portraits of women that Utamaro won his great fame. Passing outside the influence of Kiyonaga, he developed in his designs of the last decade of the nineteenth century his characteristic feminine type. Her strange and languid beauty, the drooping lines of her robes, her unnatural slenderness and willowiness, are the emanations of Utamaro's feverish mind; as her creator he ranks as the most brilliant, the most sophisticated, and the most poetical designer of his time. His life was spent in alternation between his workshop and the haunts of the Yoshiwara, whose beautiful inhabitants he immortalized in prints that are the ultimate expression of the mortal body's longing for a more than mortal perfection of happiness. Wearied of every common pleasure, he created these visions in whose disembodied, morbid loveliness his overwrought desires found consolation.
