Beauties

Beauties is an [oban](/glossary/oban) color woodblock print by Utagawa Yoshiiku dated to the first month of 1861, depicting a group of women in contemporary Edo dress arranged in the format of a [bijin-ga](/glossary/bijin-ga) (picture of beauties). The design belongs to Yoshiiku's late-Edo bijin production, parallel to his [Yokohama-e](/glossary/yokohama-e) and actor prints of the same years, and shows the Utagawa-school habit, learned from his master Kuniyoshi, of grouping multiple figures across the page with careful attention to hairstyle, kimono pattern, and small props as character notes. The composition relies on the long diagonal of grouped figures and on the precise alignment of overlapping textile patterns, a hallmark of bakumatsu bijin-ga production after the loosening of mid-nineteenth-century sumptuary restrictions on color printing. The Metropolitan Museum's impression (2007.49.226) entered the collection through the Mary Griggs Burke Fund and is part of the museum's substantial holdings of late Edo and Meiji [ukiyo-e](/glossary/ukiyo-e). The print is studied as a representative example of Yoshiiku's bijin work at the moment of his greatest productivity in the early 1860s, just before the political crises of the Bakumatsu years began to reshape Edo's print economy.