Courtesans Hitomoto and Tagasode from the Daimonji house

Hitomoto and Tagasode of the Daimonjiya are presented here in one of the great double portraits from Kitao Masanobu's New Yoshiwara Beauties Compared (Yoshiwara keisei shin bijin awase jihitsu kagami), published in 1783-1784. The artist, who by this point was also writing popular fiction under the name Santō Kyōden, identifies each woman by house and by a sample of her own brushed calligraphy, transforming a [bijin-ga](/glossary/bijin-ga) into a kind of social document of the Yoshiwara at its most prestigious moment. Hitomoto and Tagasode of the Daimonji house were among the highest-ranking courtesans of the quarter, and Masanobu honors that status with extravagant robes, the precise stiff folds of which dominate the lower half of the sheet, and with calmly individualized faces drawn in a style that owes something to Kiyonaga but is recognizably Masanobu's. The horizontal double-page format of the album, larger than any standard sheet, allowed the artist to set the two figures into a continuous decorative field rather than two separate panels. The result is a kind of public portrait of Edo's celebrity culture, in which the licensed quarter functioned as a stage. Now in the MAK collection in Vienna, the sheet is part of one of the most complete surviving sets of this celebrated album and remains a touchstone for any study of late-eighteenth-century Edo bijin-ga.