#70 Two Women — Coaster

Utamaro did something no Japanese print artist had done before: he brought the face right up to the edge of the paper and filled the sheet with it, so a woman's expression rather than her costume became the subject. Publishers had never sold a print that way. The technique is called *ōkubi-e*, large-head picture, and within a decade the government restricted it, on the grounds that it made celebrities of ordinary women. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.