The Courtesan Nareginu of the Wakanaya

A color woodblock print in the hosoban format (approximately 30.2 by 14 cm) held by the Art Institute of Chicago (Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Harold G. Henderson), with the museum's attribution carefully prefixed 'Attributed to Kikugawa Eishin (Hidenobu)' and the working date range 'c. 1804/30.' The print names the courtesan Nareginu of the Wakanaya brothel, one of the lesser-documented Yoshiwara houses of the Bunka era. The hosoban — a narrow vertical format roughly half the width of the standard ōban sheet — was a favored carrier for single-figure courtesan portraits across the late-Edo period, and Eishin uses it here in the Kikukawa house manner inherited from his teacher Eizan: an elongated full-length figure occupying most of the sheet's vertical extent, the patterned kimono and obi carrying the design weight against a minimally treated ground. The 'Attributed to' qualifier reflects the documentary thinness of Eishin's secure corpus and the museum's caution about assigning every signed sheet to his hand without supporting evidence from signature analysis or publisher attribution. The print is part of the Henderson gift, one of the principal twentieth-century groupings of late-Edo bijin-ga to reach the Art Institute, and is one of three Eishin sheets in the museum's collection.