The Courtesan Hitomoto of the Daimonjiya House — 大文字屋内ひともと

The Courtesan Hitomoto of the Daimonjiya House (Daimonjiya-uchi Hitomoto) is a portrait of a named high-ranking courtesan of the Yoshiwara, the licensed pleasure quarter of Edo. The Daimonjiya was one of the most prestigious houses of the quarter, and Hitomoto - whose name is recorded in the printed cartouche - was a celebrity of her generation in the same way that contemporary actors and sumo wrestlers were celebrities. The print belongs to Keisai Eisen's series Contemporary Scenes in the Pleasure Quarters and is a representative example of late-Edo Yoshiwara [bijin-ga](/glossary/bijin-ga). The courtesan is dressed in the full ceremonial regalia of her rank: layered outer robes with bold patterns, a heavy obi tied in front (the visible marker of her profession), and an elaborate cluster of combs and pins arrayed around her head. Eisen builds the figure with the elongated proportions and small head that became his trademark after about 1820, and the costume is rendered with the saturated reds, indigos and blacks that anchored Edo [ukiyo-e](/glossary/ukiyo-e) in the Bunsei and Tenpo eras. The sheet is reproduced from the ukiyo-e.org archive (Eisen Keisai, Contemporary Scenes in the Pleasure Quarters), and impressions of Eisen's named-courtesan prints are held in collections including the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and the British Museum. The print is also a documentary record: each named courtesan in this series corresponds to a real woman in the Yoshiwara registers of the late 1820s and early 1830s.