Woman Applying Makeup- Kesho no Onna — 化粧の女

A woman applying makeup — "kesho no onna" — from 1918, one of the series of women-at-toilette subjects that occupied Goyo throughout the late Taisho period. The title's Japanese ("化粧の女") confirms the direct, classificatory approach Goyo took to his subjects: this is a woman doing makeup, observed and recorded with the same attention a naturalist might bring to documenting a specific behavior. The act of applying makeup was simultaneously completely ordinary and — in Goyo's rendering — charged with quiet beauty.