The Courtesan Hinazuru of the Chojiya with her Attendants, from the series "Edo Purple in the Pleasure Quarters (Seiro Edo murasaki)"

The Courtesan Hinazuru of the Chojiya with her Attendants, from the series Edo Purple in the Pleasure Quarters (Seiro Edo murasaki), dated 1785 in the Art Institute of Chicago, is a portrait of a leading Yoshiwara courtesan flanked by her kamuro and shinzo attendants. Chōbunsai Eishi conceived the Seiro Edo murasaki series as an extended catalogue of named beauties from the great Edo houses, identifying each by name and establishment in the cartouche so that connoisseurs could match print to reputation. Hinazuru of the Chojiya was one of the elite oiran whose movements through the quarter were treated almost as ceremonial events. Eishi's training in the Kano studio of Eisen'in Michinobu before turning to [ukiyo-e](/glossary/ukiyo-e) shows in the careful staging of the principal figure: she is granted vertical authority while the attendants are arranged in subordinate diagonals, a hierarchical composition entirely appropriate to her standing. The Chobunsai school treatment is unmistakable, with elongated proportions, long unbroken contour lines, and restrained color that gives weight to patterned textile rather than to incident. The series name plays on the literary association of murasaki, the color purple and the author of The Tale of Genji, lending classical dignity to the contemporary subject in the kind of literary mitate Eishi favored. The Art Institute of Chicago documents the impression's 1785 date and its place within an important early Eishi series, making it useful for tracing how he developed the named-courtesan portrait that would dominate Edo [bijin-ga](/glossary/bijin-ga) in the years that followed.