Woman After a Bath, from "Comparison of Alluring Beauties (Irokurabe enpu sugata)"

Woman After a Bath, from Comparison of Alluring Beauties (Irokurabe enpu sugata), is a 1776 print that belongs to the early phase of Torii Kiyonaga's bijin-ga, before the artist had fully developed the tall figural proportions of his early-1780s maturity. The Irokurabe enpu sugata series was a comparative set of fashionable women in distinct domestic situations, and the bath subject — a young woman in the relaxed kimono and loosened hairstyle that followed bathing — was a recurrent theme in Edo bijin-ga, charged with intimacy without crossing into the explicit shunga register. Kiyonaga at this date was working in a manner still informed by Kitao Shigemasa and Isoda Koryusai, with slimmer figures and lightly tinted backgrounds, but the precise contouring of the kimono and the controlled placement of accessories already announce the disciplined draftsmanship that would carry the Torii school into a new role. As Kiyonaga assumed leadership of the Torii lineage, which had built its commercial business on kabuki signboards and actor prints, he steered the studio toward exactly this kind of bijin-ga production, an effort that would within a few years make him the leading designer in Edo. The Art Institute of Chicago records an impression of this 1776 design among its early Kiyonaga holdings.