The Actor Nakamura Riko with a courtesan, from an untitled series of aiban prints depicting Actors in private life

The Actor Nakamura Riko with a Courtesan, from an untitled series of [aiban](/glossary/aiban) prints depicting actors in private life, is a 1776 Torii Kiyonaga design that occupies the productive ground between the Torii school's traditional kabuki-actor subject matter and the [bijin-ga](/glossary/bijin-ga) genre that Kiyonaga was making increasingly his own. The series concept — actors away from the stage, in informal or romantic settings — let Kiyonaga apply the disciplined contour drawing the Torii school had developed for theatrical billboards to a private-life subject closer to the bijin-ga register. Nakamura Riko, an onnagata specialist, is paired with a courtesan in a composition that visually relates two adjacent worlds of Edo public culture: the licensed pleasure quarter and the kabuki theater. The aiban format — slightly larger than [chuban](/glossary/chuban) but smaller than [oban](/glossary/oban) — gave Kiyonaga a roomy field for two figures without committing to the full vertical or horizontal scale of his later masterworks. The series also illustrates how, at the moment Kiyonaga assumed effective leadership of the Torii school, he negotiated the studio's pivot from primary identification with kabuki signboards to the broader pictorial enterprise of Edo bijin-ga. The Art Institute of Chicago records this design among its 1776 Kiyonaga holdings.