The Courtesan Takigawa of the Ogiya with Her Attendants Onami and Menami, from the series "Models for Fashion: New Designs as Fresh as Young Leaves (Hinagata wakana no hatsu moyo)"

The Courtesan Takigawa of the Ogiya with Her Attendants Onami and Menami, from the series Models for Fashion: New Designs as Fresh as Young Leaves (Hinagata wakana no hatsu moyo), dated 1783 in the Art Institute of Chicago, is a defining sheet of Torii Kiyonaga's most celebrated Yoshiwara series. The Ogiya was among the most prestigious of the great brothel houses, and Takigawa was for many years its principal courtesan, with her kamuro Onami and Menami making up a familiar trio in Edo print culture. Kiyonaga places the three women across the sheet so that Takigawa's senior position is registered by scale and centrality, while Onami and Menami flank her in coordinated but subtly differentiated robes. The series was a fashion plate as much as a celebrity portrait: each design advertised seasonal kimono patterns that Edo women could imitate, and Hinagata wakana no hatsu moyo set the standard for how the visual economy of textile and identity could be combined in a single sheet. As a Torii school heir, Kiyonaga brought his confident outline and large flat areas of colour to the project, while his elongated Edo bijin-ga proportions gave Takigawa the dignity her real-world position required. The Art Institute of Chicago preserves the work in its substantial Kiyonaga holdings. For collectors, this sheet is at the centre of Kiyonaga's mature production, both as a named portrait of one of the Yoshiwara's most influential figures and as a high point of the bijin-ga genre.