Woman Looking in Mirror

Woman Looking in Mirror is a single-figure bijin surimono from the early nineteenth century in which Shinsai constructs a quiet, almost private scene of self-attention. The subject—a woman engaged with her reflection in a hand mirror or small standing mirror—gave the artist room to display the textile patterning and hairline work that distinguish deluxe surimono printing, and gave the kyoka poets contributing to the print a familiar reservoir of mirror imagery to draw from. The print is held at the Art Institute of Chicago. Compositions of this kind sit at the intersection of bijin-ga and still life in Shinsai's output, the mirror functioning both as figure attribute and as the surimono designer's favorite kind of object: a small, finely made thing that organizes the space around it.