Kokonoe of the Maruya, from the series Beauties of the Licensed Quarter

Kokonoe of the Maruya, from the series Beauties of the Licensed Quarter (Kakuchū bijin kurabe), is an oban-tate (vertical large-format) color woodblock print designed by Rekisentei Eiri around 1798. The series belongs to the Yoshiwara celebrity-portrait genre that the Chōbunsai school cultivated throughout the 1790s in conscious parallel with Utamaro's bijin-ga published by the same Edo houses. Kokonoe was a high-ranking courtesan of the Maruya, one of the Yoshiwara teahouses whose named beauties appeared frequently in late-eighteenth-century prints. Eiri depicts her standing in three-quarter view against a plain ground, her body elongated to the swan-necked verticality that defines the Chōbunsai canon and her kimono falling in long vertical pleats of muted color. The composition exhibits the school's hallmark restraint — pale plums, silvers, and ivory tones — and the figure occupies the center of the sheet in a stable, almost iconic posture that recalls the title-page layouts of classical poetry anthologies. The Kakuchū bijin kurabe series is one of the clearest expressions of Eiri's distinctive role within the Chōbunsai school: a designer of narrow output but consistently high refinement, working at the end of the century in which Yoshiwara bijin-ga reached its classical maturity. Impressions of designs from the series are held by the Art Institute of Chicago.