Picture of a beautiful woman

This print, whose title is a direct rendering of "bijin-ga" itself, exemplifies the genre that Shinsui made his lifelong subject. A formal half- or three-quarter-length portrait of a young woman is the conventional treatment for such a title, with the figure's kimono pattern, obi knot, and hair ornament selected to evoke a specific season or social register. Shinsui's bijin-ga inherit the formal vocabulary of late Edo masters such as Utamaro and Eishi but apply nihonga-trained drawing to the rendering of facial features, replacing the schematic faces of ukiyo-e with subtly individualized expressions. The mokuhanga production would have demanded numerous color blocks to capture the brocade patterning of the textile, with embossing (karazuri) and burnishing techniques sometimes employed to suggest woven texture. The persistent use of "bijin" in his titles, throughout decades of practice, signals Shinsui's deliberate identification with this lineage even as he modernized its visual idiom.