Kunisada: Beauty With Magic Fountain Toy and Fabric Background

Artist: Utagawa Kunisada (1786-1865)Title: （Fountain Toy 噴水の玩具）Series: Atsurae ori tōsei jima (誂織當世島) “Modern Fashionable Striped Fabrics to Order”  Date: 1843-47 Unusual design of a married woman entertaining a young boy with a magic fountain, the background design featuring a coarse weave pattern. He looks up, astonished. She is wearing a fabulous kimono, with an eye-catching pattern, and the background is also a fabric pattern.  This series features scenes of daily life, mainly women with children enjoying leisure activities; it also features fabrics woven with different fashionable stripe designs of the time, which are applied as background to the compositions. The last character of the series title “shima 島”, the character used for stripes in earlier period and refers to “an island”, developed to the character “shima 縞” in late Edo. It is said that stripe designs were introduced in ca. 18th century, probably from Nanban 南蛮, Spain or Portugal. In the  early Edo period, the horizont