A Brocade of Eastern Manners (Fûzoku Azuma no nishiki): Two Daughters of a Bannerman with a Serving Woman and a Young Man

Two Daughters of a Bannerman with a Serving Woman and a Young Man belongs to Torii Kiyonaga's series A Brocade of Eastern Manners (Fuzoku Azuma no nishiki), a benchmark of 1780s Edo bijin-ga held by the Art Institute of Chicago and indexed by ukiyo-e.org. The series title, evoking the East (Azuma, i.e., Edo) as a region whose customs were as splendid as woven brocade, advertises a project to depict the fashionable life of the shogunal capital across social classes. Here the figures are identified as the daughters of a hatamoto—a direct retainer of the shogun—accompanied by a serving woman and a young man, situating the scene within the samurai-class domestic world that Kiyonaga visited only occasionally in print. The tall, broad-shouldered young women dominate the composition in his characteristic Edo bijin-ga proportions, their formal robes rendered with carefully patterned textiles that signal rank as well as fashion. Kiyonaga, the fourth head of the Torii school, places the figures across the picture plane in the calm frieze-like rhythm that he developed during this decade, while the male attendant and serving woman add the social texture appropriate to a bannerman's household. The series as a whole illustrates the way the Torii school, under his direction, extended its repertoire from kabuki imagery to the more diverse social subject matter that came to dominate late-Tenmei printmaking. The impression at the Art Institute of Chicago is one of the better-known sheets of the series and a key example of Kiyonaga's interest in the costume and demeanor of Edo's military and merchant elites.