UTAMARO (1754-1806)  , one of the best known of the Japanese designers of colour-prints, was born at Kawayoye . His father was a well-known painter of the Kano School, Toriyama Sekiyen (Toyofusa), a pupil of Kano Chikanobu; and Utamaro traced his descent from the old feudal clans of the Minamoto, whose war with the Taira family belongs to the romantic period of Japanese history . Utamaro's personal name was Yusuke; and he first worked under the signature Toriyama Toyo-aki; but after a quarrel with his father substituted the name Kitagawa for the former appellation . His distinct style was the outcome of that of his father, tempered with the characteristics of the Kano school . As a painter, his landscapes and drawings of insects are most highly considered by Japanese critics; but his fame will always rest among Europeans on his designs for colour-prints, the subjects of which are almost entirely women—professional beauties and the like . These were done for the most part while he lived, in a sort of bondage, in the house of a publisher, Tsutaya Shigesaburo . His talents were wasted by an unbroken career of dissipation, culminating in a term of imprisonment for a pictorial libel on the shogun Iyenari, in 1804 . From this he never recovered, and died on the third day of the fifth month, 18o6 . The colour-prints of Utamaro are distinguished by an extreme grace of line and of colour . His composition is superb; and even in his lifetimehe achieved such popularity among his contemporaries as to gain the title Ukiyo-ye Chuko-no-so, " great master of the Popular School." His work has a considerable reputation with the Dutch who visited Nagasaki, and was imported into Europe before the end of the 18th century . His book illustrations are also of great beauty . Three portraits of him are known: two colour-prints by himself, and one painting by Chobunsai Yeishi (in the collection of Mr Arthur Morrison) .

His prints were frequently copied by his contemporaries, especially by the first Toyokuni and by Shunsen; and many of those bearing his name are really the work of Koikawa Harumachi, who had been a

fellow-student, and afterwards married his widow . That artist is known by the name of Utamaro II . Most of these imitations were made between 18o8 and 182o . Utamaro II., who afterwards changed his name to Kitagawa Tetsugoro, died between 183o and 1843 . See E. de Goncourt, Outamaro (1891); E . F . Strange, Japanese Illustration (1897) ; and Japanese Colour-Prints (Victoria and Albert Museum Handbook, 1904) . (E . F .