Daughter

Daughter belongs to Keisai Eisen's series Six Modern Beauties, a set in which the artist surveyed the social roles available to young women of late Edo. Eisen (1790-1848) was one of the dominant bijin-ga designers of the Bunsei and Tenpo eras, and his Edo ukiyo-e idiom is unmistakable here: a tall, narrow figure, an elongated neck and small head, and a slow downward curve to the shoulders that became his trademark in the years after Utamaro's death. The subject is identified by her costume rather than by any individual likeness. Her under-kimono and outer robe are layered to display the soft, lined hems and sleeve openings that fashionable Edo households favored, and her hair is dressed in one of the unmarried-daughter coiffures (musume-mage) that distinguished her from the geisha and courtesans Eisen treated elsewhere in the same series. The print sets the figure against a near-empty ground, throwing all attention onto the textiles and onto the carefully observed angle of the head. The image is reproduced from a sheet in the ukiyo-e.org image archive (Eisen Keisai, Six Modern Beauties, Daughter), the publicly accessible cross-museum index that aggregates impressions from collections including the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and Waseda University. As with all Eisen Daughter sheets in the series, the print exemplifies the late-Edo taste for bijin-ga that emphasized fashion and class type rather than psychological portraiture, and it documents the visual vocabulary by which Edo viewers read a young woman's age, status and household at a glance.