Two Geisha

This Metropolitan Museum of Art woodblock print, depicting two geisha together, sits within Eizan's two-figure bijin-ga tradition. The Met catalogues the work as ink and color on paper. Unlike the oiran of the Yoshiwara, geisha — particularly the geisha of Fukagawa (the Tatsumi district that Eizan elsewhere celebrated in his "Contemporary Flowers of the Southeast" series) — wore looser, darker, more understated robes and projected a different kind of urban femininity: musical, witty, somewhat unbiddable. Eizan's two geisha here display the visual restraint of that world: less elaborate hairpinning, simpler obi knots, and a flatter palette than the Yoshiwara dochu prints would use. Within his oeuvre the geisha subjects form a quieter counterpart to the elaborate oiran portraits and demonstrate the breadth of Edo's female fashion landscape.