Interior of the House called Ōgiya

Held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art and dated circa 1800, this triptych of woodblock prints depicts the interior of the Ōgiya, the most prestigious of all Yoshiwara houses and the home of stars including Hanaōgi and Segawa. Where the daytime-display triptychs view the brothel from the street, looking in across the wooden lattice, this design reverses the perspective and pictures the Ōgiya from within — its tatami rooms, its sliding paper screens, its receding planes of architectural framework. Courtesans and attendants are distributed across the three sheets in conversation, preparation, and movement. The print belongs to a broader Yoshiwara-documentary mode in which the great houses were rendered with something approaching architectural-portrait care; the Ōgiya in particular accumulated a large iconography across the late 1790s, of which Eishō's triptych is a key example.