The Courtesan Hanaogi of the Ogiya

This oban color woodblock print of the courtesan Hanaogi of the Ogiya, held by the Art Institute of Chicago and dated to about 1798, is among Ichirakutei Eisui's most often-reproduced sheets. Hanaogi was perhaps the most celebrated courtesan of late-eighteenth-century Edo, famed for her skill in poetry and calligraphy as well as for her beauty, and her name appears across the bijin-ga of Utamaro, Eishi, Choki, and the other major designers of the Kansei era. Eisui's treatment places her in the elegant idiom of the Chobunsai Eishi school, with elongated proportions, a narrow oval face, and a delicately handled contour. A cartouche identifies the sitter and her house, the Ogiya, one of the three great brothels of the Yoshiwara. The print shares its idiom with Eisui's portraits of Hanahito and Takigawa, also of the Ogiya, and together these sheets demonstrate the artist's role in shaping the visual record of the house and its oiran. The Art Institute's impression preserves the subtle color and clean linework that distinguish a sound late-eighteenth-century printing, and it offers an important point of comparison with the artist's other portraits of named courtesans.