Two Women on Balcony

Catalogued as 'Two Women on Balcony' in the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria's ukiyo-e holdings and surfaced through ukiyo-e.org, this Utagawa Kunisada design belongs to his enormous output of bijinga, the prints of women that ran in parallel to his yakusha-e and helped define the visual culture of Edo. The balcony, or engawa, of an upper-floor room in the pleasure quarters or in a fashionable teahouse was a familiar Edo print setting. It allowed the designer to suspend his figures between architecture and landscape: behind them, a glimpse of garden, river or city; in front of them, the woven ground of a tatami room and the heavy patterned fall of a kimono. Kunisada uses the device to set two women in conversation, their poses turned slightly toward each other so that fabric, hair, and the angle of a sleeve carry as much of the design as their faces. The Art Gallery of Greater Victoria documents the work as Kunisada's design without further series identification or firm date, so this entry treats it as a free-standing bijinga rather than ascribing it to a specific set. By the mid-nineteenth century, when Kunisada was the most active designer in the Utagawa school, prints of this kind dominated the Edo print market alongside actor portraits, and they remain the easiest sheets through which to read his fashionable, densely patterned late style. Image and bibliographic data are courtesy of ukiyo-e.org.