Courtesans Takigawa and Hanaogi from the Ogi house

Hanaōgi and Takigawa of the Ōgiya were arguably the two most celebrated courtesans in the entire Yoshiwara at the moment Kitao Masanobu drew them, and this double portrait from the New Yoshiwara Beauties Compared album of 1783-1784 is the work for which the artist is best remembered. Masanobu — who under the name Santō Kyōden was already producing some of Edo's most-read comic fiction — pairs the two stars on the broad horizontal sheet that was the album's signature format, gives each a name cartouche and a passage of her own brushed verse, and dresses them in robes whose patterns are printed at a scale and crispness that the standard ōban could never accommodate. The faces are calm, oval, and individualized, the bodies tall and slightly mannered in the way the Kitao school favored, and the surrounding empty paper functions as the air of the parlor rather than as background. This is Edo [bijin-ga](/glossary/bijin-ga) at its most aspirational: the licensed quarter as a place of poetry, calligraphy, and refined display, not titillation. The Vienna MAK holds the sheet as part of one of the most complete sets of the album to survive, and it remains, alongside Kiyonaga's grand bijin compositions of the same years, a touchstone for the late-eighteenth-century print at its most ambitious.