Beni (Rouge) 42/100

Beni (Rouge), numbered 42/100 and indexed through ukiyo-e.org from the Art of Japan archive, belongs to the small but influential body of bijin-ga that Torii Kotondo produced under the shin-hanga publishing system in the late 1920s and early 1930s. The title refers to beni, the traditional red cosmetic — derived from safflower — that Japanese women applied to their lips and lower eyelids; the act of putting on beni, performed with a small brush before a mirror, had been a charged subject in ukiyo-e since the Edo period. Kotondo, as the seventh-generation head of the Torii school of kabuki signboard painters, inherited a draftsmanship trained on the male spectacle of the stage and redirected it toward the female interior, in this case the precise instant when a woman tilts her head to apply pigment to her mouth. The edition limitation — one hundred impressions — was characteristic of shin-hanga publishing under figures such as Ikeda and Sakai, whose deluxe production model relied on small print runs printed on heavy hosho paper with expensive pigments and mica accents. The numbered impression preserved in the Art of Japan inventory, and now discoverable through ukiyo-e.org, documents how the modernized Torii school bijin-ga circulated to early collectors as numbered fine-art objects rather than as the mass-market commercial sheets of earlier ukiyo-e generations, securing Kotondo's reputation as one of shin-hanga's most refined draftsmen of women.