A Woman and Two Maids, from the series "A Mirror of Feminine Manners (Onna fuzoku masu kagami)"

A Woman and Two Maids, from the series A Mirror of Feminine Manners (Onna fuzoku masu kagami), dated 1785 in the Art Institute of Chicago, presents a Torii Kiyonaga group of three women whose costume and bearing identify them as a townswoman and her attendants. The series title—Mirror of Feminine Manners—signals the didactic ambition of the project: each sheet is meant to model a category of female deportment, from courtesan to housewife to seasonal worker, treated as if reflected in a flawless mirror. Kiyonaga arranges the trio with the principal figure slightly forward and slightly taller than her two maids, her superior status registered through scale and through the relative simplicity of her dress. The series was issued during the high point of Kiyonaga's career, when his elongated Edo bijin-ga figures had displaced the smaller, more lyrical types of Harunobu and Koryusai. As an heir to the Torii school, he kept the linear scaffolding crisp, allowing the carefully chosen textile patterns to do the work of characterisation. The print is also a useful reminder that Kiyonaga's bijin-ga ranges far beyond the Yoshiwara: townswomen and their maids occupy as much space in his oeuvre as named courtesans, and series like Onna fuzoku masu kagami catalogue that wider female world. The Art Institute of Chicago records the work among its Kiyonaga holdings. For collectors, the sheet is valuable as a typological example of Kiyonaga's interest in everyday women and as evidence of bijin-ga's quiet didactic dimension.