Two Women and a Child after a Bath

Two Women and a Child after a Bath, a 1777 Torii Kiyonaga design, returns the artist to the post-bath interior subject he had treated in 1776, this time expanded into a three-figure composition that incorporates a small child alongside the two adult women. The post-bath setting — loosened kimono, undone or partly arranged hair, light towel or robe at hand — was a regular vehicle for Edo bijin-ga's interest in the relaxed domestic moment, charged with intimacy without crossing into the explicit register of shunga. Kiyonaga's inclusion of a child broadens the subject's social texture, suggesting a household with children and the rhythms of family bathing that Edo's neighborhood sento and household practices would have made familiar. His figural style at 1777 is steadily firming up, the contour lines stronger than in the 1775 sheets and the proportions trending toward the increased scale that would define his early-1780s maturity. The print also evidences the breadth of subject matter the Torii school under his leadership was accommodating within the bijin-ga tradition — toilette interiors, hanami outings, Yoshiwara processions, meisho views — as the studio's range broadened around its kabuki-signboard core. The Art Institute of Chicago records this design among its 1777 Kiyonaga holdings.