"Bathtime," Kitagawa Utamaro, c. 1801.

The life of Utamaro (c.1753-1806) is largely a mystery; we don't know where he was born or who his family was. Many believe he was married and had a child, as the same mother and child show up in a lot of his prints of domestic life.

His work first appeared in the 1770s, at the height of Japan's Edo period; at the time, he worked mostly designing prints for books, but later gave that up for making prints of individual women. His portraits of women, many of them geishas, made his fame. He later went on to do many works of insects, flowers, animals, erotica, and scenes of domestic life. He was arrested in 1804 for violating Imperial censorship laws, seemingly by depicting samurai with their crests accurately copied, which was forbidden, but it's unknown what his punishment was.

This is from his later period, perhaps a depiction of his wife and child. It's a sincerely portrayed work of an intimate moment between mother and child. Upon his death in 1806, he had no known heirs, and his tomb was left neglected and untended, until fans restored it in 1917.

From the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

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