The Courtesan Misyama of Chojiya (from the series Eight Views of Beautiful Women of the Green Houses)

Kitagawa Utamaro's portrait of the courtesan Misayama of the Chojiya, from his series Eight Views of Beautiful Women of the Green Houses dating to around 1790, brings the venerable Eight Views convention into the heart of the Yoshiwara. The traditional Eight Views landscape mode, descended from the Chinese Xiao and Xiang river cycle, had long ordered famous scenery into a fixed sequence of evocative moods; Utamaro and his publisher reuse the structure to organize the leading courtesans of the licensed quarter into a comparable octet, with each woman aligned to a particular nuance of beauty. Misayama, attached to the Chojiya brothel, here represents one of these views, her robes, hair ornaments, and bearing functioning as the visual equivalent of a specific evening or weather. The design participates in the formative period of Utamaro's ukiyo-e career, when he was beginning to dominate Edo bijin-ga in collaboration with the publisher Tsutaya Juzaburo. The Cleveland Museum of Art holds the impression. Considered within Utamaro's wider output, the Chojiya design demonstrates how he absorbed classical Chinese and Japanese genre frameworks and recoded them around the contemporary celebrity of the Yoshiwara, a strategy that would define many of his most successful series across the next decade.