The Flirtatious Type, from Ten Types in the Physiognomy of Women (c. 1793): Art, History and Details

The Flirtatious Type, from Ten Types in the Physiognomy of Women (c. 1793) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Kitagawa Utamaro (Japanese, c. 1754–1806).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

Kitagawa Utamaro was well known for his close-up portraits that belonged to a genre, or category, of images called bijinga (pictures of beautiful people). This print is from a series that invites comparisons of the attractiveness of different figures. It comes from a series that assigns personality traits to women based on their physical appearance.

Object facts

• Title: The Flirtatious Type, from Ten Types in the Physiognomy of Women
• Date: c. 1793
• Creator attribution: Kitagawa Utamaro (Japanese, c. 1754–1806)
• Culture: Japan, Edo period (1615–1868)
• Type: Print
• Technique: color woodblock print
• Dimensions: 36.9 x 25.4 cm (14 1/2 x 10 in.)
• Collection: Japanese Art
• Department: Japanese Art
• Accession number: 1930.218

A detail from the museum

Only two impressions from this series have pink mica.

Collection credit

Bequest of Edward L. Whittemore

Further reading listed by the museum

• Hollis, Howard C. “The Edward Loder Whittemore Collection of Japanese Prints.” The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 17, no. 4 (1930): 64–66.
• Lee, Sherman E. Japanese Decorative Style. [Cleveland]: Cleveland Museum of Art, 1961.
• Lee, Sherman E. A History of Far Eastern Art. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1982.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.