Geisha of Edo

Geisha of Edo is a single-figure bijin-ga by Keisai Eisen (1790-1848) portraying one of the city's professional female entertainers. The geisha emerged as a distinct profession in the eighteenth century and by Eisen's day was firmly separated, both legally and socially, from the courtesans of the Yoshiwara: geisha were entertainers - musicians, dancers, conversationalists - and their costume signaled this restraint. Eisen's figure follows that convention. The kimono is sober rather than spectacular, the obi is tied in the back rather than in front as a courtesan would tie it, and the hair is dressed with relatively few combs and pins. Eisen instead invests the design with the linear sophistication that made him the leading bijin-ga designer of his generation: the silhouette is elongated, the neck disproportionately long, the head small, and the contour drawn with the confident black line that defined Edo ukiyo-e printmaking in the 1820s and 1830s. The image is reproduced from the ukiyo-e.org archive sourced from Art of Japan; impressions of Eisen's Edo-geisha designs are held in collections including the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. The print is a useful index of how Eisen, after Utamaro's death in 1806, helped consolidate a new urban iconography for bijin-ga - one in which the working geisha, rather than the high-ranking courtesan, increasingly became the everyday face of the floating world.