Courtesan (Oiran)

Held in the University Art Museum of Tokyo University of the Arts and known generally as the Bijin (Oiran), this 1872 oil on canvas (77 by 54.8 cm) is among the earliest surviving major works by Takahashi Yuichi and one of the foundational documents of Meiji yōga. The painting was commissioned by the Edo-born courtesan Komurasaki of the Inamotoya brothel in the Yoshiwara and shows her in three-quarter view, seated upright in formal oiran dress: an elaborate uchikake-style outer kimono richly patterned with floral roundels, the heavy bekkō tortoiseshell pins of the high-ranking courtesan fanning out from her hair, the dyed-black teeth and shaved eyebrows of the Edo-period courtesan still preserved in this transitional moment of the early Meiji.

The portrait stands as a key transitional image of Japanese culture itself: the sitter belongs entirely to the world of Tokugawa Edo and would within a few years be erased by the abolition of the legal pleasure quarter in 1874, while the medium and tonal handling — the careful chiaroscuro of the face, the heavy modelling of the silks, the indeterminate dark ground — bring her into the visual vocabulary of European bourgeois portraiture as Yuichi had absorbed it from Charles Wirgman in Yokohama and from the imported lithographs he had studied at the Bansho Shirabesho. Komurasaki was reportedly distressed by the unflattering directness of the resulting likeness, and the painting has been read in subsequent literature both as the founding portrait of the yōga tradition and as an inadvertent meditation on the violence of the Western pictorial mode when first applied to an indigenous subject.