Woman Admiring Morning Glories while Brushing Her Teeth

Woman Admiring Morning Glories while Brushing Her Teeth is a color woodblock print designed by Torii Kiyonaga in 1774, a charming example of the everyday subjects that occupied his early [bijin-ga](/glossary/bijin-ga) production. The image catches a young woman in the loose, undressed moment of her morning toilette, a small tooth-cleaning twig in her mouth, her attention turning aside to a flowering vine of morning glories that has opened during the night. In Edo culture, morning glories (asagao) carried strong associations with summer dawn, transient beauty, and the brief flowering of youth, and Kiyonaga uses the parallel between the fresh blossoms and the unselfconscious young woman to give a quiet seasonal meaning to a domestic vignette. As the rising designer of the Torii school, traditionally bound to kabuki signboards, Kiyonaga here works in the more intimate idiom of Edo bijin-ga, recording private indoor moments of fashionable women with calm dignity. The Art Institute of Chicago, which holds this impression, dates the print to the productive mid-1770s when Kiyonaga was absorbing the manner of Suzuki Harunobu and Kitao Shigemasa while beginning to develop the taller, more statuesque figure type for which he would soon be celebrated. The palette is gentle and tonally close, the line work fine and elastic, the composition restricted to the figure and the flowers so that the seasonal motif resonates without distraction. For modern viewers, the sheet exemplifies how Edo print designers found visual poetry in routine acts of grooming, treating brushing one's teeth at the veranda as a subject worthy of careful aesthetic attention.