Summer Beauty

A bijin in summer dress — one of Goyo's summer beauty subjects rendered with the languid, heat-softened quality that distinguished his summer compositions from the more formally dressed women in other seasonal contexts. The summer beauty (natsu bijin) was a conventional category in bijin-ga, but Goyo transforms the convention through his insistence on specific, observed femininity: his summer women are not merely seasonal emblems but women who genuinely feel the heat, whose postures carry the slight loosening that warmth produces in the body.