Out for a Walk, from the series "A Collection of Contemporary Beauties of the Pleasure Quarters (Tosei yuri bijin awase)"

Out for a Walk, from Torii Kiyonaga's series A Collection of Contemporary Beauties of the Pleasure Quarters (Tosei yuri bijin awase), is held by the Art Institute of Chicago and dated to about 1778. The Japanese awase format - matching, comparing, or competing - was used widely in Edo print culture to organize series, and here Kiyonaga sets contemporary courtesans and entertainers from various licensed quarters into a sequence of single-sheet portraits. The 'Out for a Walk' subject removes the figures from the formal interior of the teahouse and sets them in motion, their robes and parasols expressed in flowing line and richly varied pattern. As a designer of the Torii school then approaching its leadership, Kiyonaga was helping to redefine what an Edo bijin-ga could look like: rather than the smaller, more delicate figures of his predecessors, his beauties stand tall and full, their proportions closer to the women a viewer might actually have seen on the avenues of Yoshiwara, Fukagawa, or Nakasu. Block printing in this period favored color blocks of subtle gradation, and the print uses them to set off the texture of woven and dyed textiles. The series formed a key step in the rise of his mature manner, and the Art Institute of Chicago's holding of this sheet preserves a moment in which the Torii school's leading younger designer demonstrated how bijin-ga could move outdoors without sacrificing the elegance of the licensed quarters.