Yamauba envelops Kintaro in her chrysanthemum-patterned kimono, kissing her son and holding a rattle in her left hand.

In mythology, Yamauba is a fearsome devil woman believed to live with her son Kintaro (Kaido-maru) on the isolated slopes of Mount Ashigara. In his work however, Utamaro always portrays her as a beautiful woman looking after her mischievous infant son who possessed supernatural strength and is traditionally depicted with bright red skin. Although other artists also produced designs on this subject, as many as fifty works by Utamaro are known, far exceeding those by other artists. The reasons for Utamaro’s high output on this subject are not clear but for the subject generally it has been proposed that the public must have responded well to it, thereby creating sufficient demand. Another possibility is that this subject would have been safe from censorship by the authorities, which might have made the subject attractive from the publisher’s perspective. See Shugo Asano and Timothy Clark, The Passionate Art of Kitagawa Utamaro, (London, 1995), nos. 386-91, pp. 226-227.

For a similar impression of the same print in the collection of the British Museum, museum number 1937,0710,0.82, go to:

https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/A_1937-0710-0-82

The Collection of Henri Vever 

Henri Vever (1854-1942) was regarded as one of the most distinguished jewellers of his time. By the 1880s, Vever was amongst the earliest Europeans to formally collect Japanese prints. He bought extensively from Hayashi Tadamasa (1853-1906) and was a member of Les Amis de l’Art Japonais, a clique of art enthusiasts, including Claude Monet (1840-1926), who met regularly to discuss Japanese works of art. In the early 20th century, Vever had already amassed a vast collection of fine prints numbering in the thousands. His collection became a focal point for scholars such as von Seidlitz, Migeon, and Lemoisne, who almost exclusively used his collection for their research. During his lifetime, Vever made several important bequests to French national collections. At the peak of World War I, Vever sold much of his collection to Matsukata Kojiro (1865-1950), which would later go on to form a significant part of the Tokyo National Museum’s collection of ukiyo-e prints.