The Samurai (Shi) from the series Beauties Illustrating the Four Social Classes (Adesugata shi no ko sho)

The Samurai (Shi), from the series Beauties Illustrating the Four Social Classes (Adesugata shi no ko sho), is a color woodblock print designed by Torii Kiyonaga in 1774. The series remaps the orthodox Confucian hierarchy of samurai, farmer, artisan, and merchant onto fashionable Edo women, assigning each class to a beauty whose dress or accessory hints at the social rank in question. The Samurai (shi) was the highest of the four classes in official Tokugawa ideology, and its allocation to a [bijin-ga](/glossary/bijin-ga) heroine here invites the viewer to read her costume, hairstyle, and attributes as feminine equivalents of warrior-class identity: perhaps a more sober palette, a domestic interior, or accessories suggestive of a samurai household. As a designer within the Torii school of woodblock artists, Kiyonaga uses the conceit to display the mature elements of his Edo bijin-ga style: the tall, statuesque figure type, the long sweeping kimono line, and the carefully chosen textile pattern that would soon dominate the genre. The Art Institute of Chicago, which holds this impression, places the print within the productive mid-1770s when Kiyonaga's mature manner was decisively forming. Color is restrained, with cool blues, warm earth tones, and patterned grounds. For modern viewers, the sheet illustrates how Edo bijin-ga absorbed the realm's official social categories into a single aesthetic continuum of feminine elegance, gently flattening the differences the shogunate had so carefully institutionalized.