Girls of Fukagawa - A Triptych (Fukagawa musume sanpukutsui)

Torii Kiyohiro composes an uncut hosoban triptych in benizuri-e from his series Girls of Fukagawa: A Triptych (Fukagawa musume sanpukutsui), a three-sheet bijin-ga of around 1755 organised around the unlicensed Fukagawa pleasure quarter east of the Sumida River. Unlike the official Yoshiwara quarter that the Tokugawa government had licensed and regulated since the seventeenth century, Fukagawa operated as a parallel and semi-tolerated demimonde whose geisha - known as tatsumi geisha after the district's location south-east of the city centre - were prized for their refusal to follow Yoshiwara's elaborate sartorial conventions. Their preference for understated dark colours, simple hairstyles, and a sashed haori jacket made them a distinctive sartorial type that appealed to print designers as a contrast to the more elaborately costumed Yoshiwara women. The uncut triptych format, with three narrow figures developed across the wider sheet, suited the comparative-grouping conceit of mid-century bijin-ga, in which sanpukutsui compositions juxtaposed three women of related types to display sartorial and gestural variation within a single decorative framework. Held by the Art Institute of Chicago as part of the Buckingham Collection of Japanese woodblock prints.