The Shrine Maiden Osute of the Tomigaoka Shrine (Tomigaoka miko Osute)

The Shrine Maiden Osute of the Tomigaoka Shrine (Tomigaoka miko Osute) is a 1777 woodblock print by Torii Kiyonaga, the Torii school master whose Edo bijin-ga set the proportional and tonal standard for the 1780s. The print portrays Osute, a celebrated miko, or shrine maiden, attached to the Tomigaoka Hachiman shrine in Fukagawa, then a popular pleasure district on the east side of the Sumida. Like the dancers and waitresses of Edo's teahouses, fashionable miko sometimes drew the attention of artists as well as worshippers, and named figures such as Osute became subjects of woodblock portraits that hovered between religious image and contemporary celebrity print. Kiyonaga renders her as a tall, dignified figure, her kimono and overlong train arranged in the slow, measured contours that distinguish his idealized women from the more compact figures of Suzuki Harunobu a decade earlier. The crisp keyblock and clearly differentiated color blocks reflect the fully developed nishiki-e printing of the late 1770s. As fourth head of the Torii school, Kiyonaga inherited a tradition of bold theatrical drawing that here gives the standing portrait a quiet authority, while his sensitivity to costume sets the print firmly in the lineage of Edo bijin-ga. The print is preserved at the Art Institute of Chicago, where it forms part of a sequence of his named-beauty portraits that illustrate how popular acclaim crossed the boundary between sacred space and commercial print culture in late eighteenth-century Edo.