A Beauty

A simple ōban portrait in the Metropolitan Museum of Art's collection, this design — recorded only by the laconic title 'A Beauty' — is a single-figure bijin-ga showing a young woman in fashionable kimono. The print is dated to the 1790s and demonstrates the more workaday register of Eishō's output: not the named celebrity portraits of Hanaōgi and Wakamurasaki, but a generic but elegantly drawn beauty intended for buyers who wanted a fashionable single-figure print without a specific identification. The handling is recognizably Eishō's — the long oval face, the small lifted hand, the patterned obi tied in front — and the Met's impression preserves the design's color work cleanly.