Dressing the Hair for New Year's Day

This bijin-ga depicts a woman engaged in the traditional New Year practice of hairdressing, likely portrayed in the process of arranging or having arranged an elaborate coiffure appropriate for the season's formal observances. New Year bijin-ga subjects conventionally include accessories such as lacquered combs, kanzashi hairpins, and mirror stands that signal both the occasion and the woman's social status. Domoto, primarily known as a nihonga and Buddhist painter, brings to this genre subject a compositional restraint that differs from the softer idealization of contemporaneous shin-hanga bijin-ga by artists such as Hashiguchi Goyo or Torii Kotondo. The print likely employs a limited but carefully considered palette, with the woman's formal kimono providing the principal color field and the background held in a neutral or subtly graded tone. Fine-line carving would be required to suggest the hair's texture and the intricacy of its arrangement.