Untitled (1784) by Kitao Masanobu

This untitled print, dated 1784, belongs to the period of Kitao Masanobu's greatest activity as a designer of luxury Edo ukiyo-e, the year of his celebrated album Comparing New Beauties of the Yoshiwara, A Mirror of Their Own Writings. Without a specific title, the work is best read as part of the broader portfolio of bijin-ga and genre prints that Masanobu, the senior pupil of Kitao Shigemasa and the leading designer of the Kitao school, was producing in the mid-1780s. The figure or figures will be rendered in his mature manner: clean, even line, carefully patterned kimono, a restrained nishiki-e palette, and the literary sensibility that came from his parallel career as the writer Santo Kyoden. The early 1780s represent the moment when Masanobu was operating at the height of his powers as a designer, before he gradually set aside print design in favour of writing in the 1790s. The Victoria and Albert Museum preserves this impression, and the institutional context of the V&A's collection ensures that the print survives within one of the major Western holdings of Edo ukiyo-e. As an untitled work from a documented year, it functions as an important reference point for understanding the breadth of Kitao Masanobu's output in the year of his most celebrated single project.