The Third Princess and Her Kitten, from an untitled series of court ladies

The Third Princess and Her Kitten is a 1779 woodblock print by Torii Kiyonaga from an untitled series of court ladies, held in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago. The subject is drawn from the Tale of Genji, in which the Third Princess (Onna San no Miya) is famously associated with a small cat whose escape from a curtain inadvertently exposes her to a key narrative encounter. Kiyonaga depicts this celebrated scene with the visual conventions of late-eighteenth-century Edo bijin-ga rather than the courtly idiom of Heian painting, presenting the princess as an elongated, statuesque figure in the manner of his contemporary mature style. As head of the Torii school, Kiyonaga had extended the workshop's reach beyond actor prints to literary and classical subjects, and this design exemplifies the mitate practice of reinterpreting canonical scenes through the dress and bearing of present-day Edo beauties. The kitten provides a small accent that anchors the iconography to the Genji episode while also softening what would otherwise be a strictly formal portrait. The Art Institute of Chicago records this impression among its Kiyonaga holdings, where it joins other prints that show the artist engaging with classical literature; the untitled series to which it belongs reflects the period taste for elegantly designed sets of court ladies that combined literary erudition with current fashion. For students of Edo print culture, the design is instructive in showing how Heian heroines were domesticated into the visual vocabulary of Edo bijin-ga, and how Kiyonaga's Torii school discipline lent itself to such literary subjects with characteristic dignity and restraint.