Two Women and a Maid, from the series "A Brocade of Eastern Manners (Fuzoku Azuma no nishiki)"

Two Women and a Maid is a 1778 woodblock print by Torii Kiyonaga from the series A Brocade of Eastern Manners (Fuzoku Azuma no nishiki), now in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago. The composition centers on a pair of fashionable Edo women accompanied by a maid, a triadic grouping that Kiyonaga handles with characteristic compositional ease, arranging the figures so that gaze, gesture, and the trailing diagonals of patterned robes guide the eye across the sheet. The series title casts contemporary Edo manners as a kind of brocade, an apt metaphor for Kiyonaga's interlocking textile patterns and the way he weaves social rank into surface ornament. As a leader of the Torii school in this period, Kiyonaga used such [bijin-ga](/glossary/bijin-ga) commissions to refine the elongated, statuesque female type that would dominate Edo bijin-ga for the next decade. The maid stands slightly apart from her mistresses, her plainer dress and lower posture marking her station, while the principal figures display the layered kimono and dressed hair appropriate to townswomen of means. Kiyonaga's draughtsmanship here is unusually relaxed for an early sheet, with the long curves of the outer robes flowing in unbroken lines from shoulder to hem. The Art Institute of Chicago documents this impression as part of its broader holdings of Kiyonaga's 1770s output, a period when the artist was still consolidating the manner he inherited from Kiyomitsu and Kiyohiro while edging toward the monumental figures of his maturity. The print stands as an instructive example of Edo bijin-ga at the moment the genre was being reset by Torii school designers around 1778.