The Waitress Osen of the Kagiya Teahouse

The Waitress Osen of the Kagiya Teahouse, a 1764 chuban-format print by Suzuki Harunobu in the Art Institute of Chicago, depicts one of the most celebrated real-life beauties of Edo's mid-eighteenth century popular culture. Kasamori Osen was a young woman who worked at the Kagiya teahouse near the Kasamori Shrine in the Yanaka district. Her looks, modesty, and the romantic mystique of the teahouse setting made her the subject of widespread admiration and an inexhaustible motif for Harunobu, who returned to her many times. In this design Harunobu shows Osen at her station, perhaps with the simple props of cups, kettle, or a tray, her body slim and slightly bent with the courteous concentration of a working young woman. Harunobu treats her with the dignity and refinement of any high-ranking bijin, but the everyday context distinguishes the print from earlier ukiyo-e portraits of courtesans. Such images marked an important development within Edo ukiyo-e: the elevation of a non-courtesan urban worker to the central place of a chuban bijin-ga design. The print also helped fix the prototype of the celebrity teahouse waitress that other artists would imitate in the following decade. Even before Harunobu's polychrome nishiki-e revolution was complete, the work captures the warmth, particularity, and modernity that made him the defining bijin-ga artist of his generation.