Beauty of the Kyoho Period

The fourth print in Kiyochika's Kyoho period bijin series completes a set of four figures representing women of the early eighteenth century (1716–1736). The Kyoho era is historically significant for the beauty imagery it generated, with artists such as Nishikawa Sukenobu establishing the canonical representation of the refined, full-figured beauty in lavish kimono that later nishiki-e artists would elaborate. Kiyochika revisits this tradition from a Meiji perspective, filtered through his awareness of Western figure drawing. The final sheet in a polyptych of this kind would typically feature a figure whose pose or coloring provides visual resolution to the sequence, often through a complementary relationship to the first sheet or through a particularly prominent compositional arrangement.