Woman with a Folding Fan and Hand Mirror, from the series Sensuous Young Women of Contemporary Times

From his 1838 bijinga series "Sensuous Young Women of Contemporary Times," this Utagawa Kunisada print presents a beautifully dressed young woman holding a folding fan and a small hand mirror, the two objects functioning simultaneously as accessories of the toilette and as conventional pictorial symbols of female grace in Edo ukiyo-e. The series belongs to Kunisada's expanding bijinga production of the 1830s, in which he set out to register the spectrum of fashionable urban femininity through serial images that emphasized subtle differences in pose, costume pattern, and accessory. As the dominant designer of female beauty of his generation, alongside his work in yakusha-e, Kunisada brought to bijinga the same exacting attention to costume detail and facial likeness that had made his actor prints commercially successful. The woman's slightly tilted head and the way she catches her own reflection in the mirror introduce a meditative undertone that softens what might otherwise have been a straightforward fashion plate. The folding fan, with its painted face barely visible to the viewer, suggests a moment between two activities, perhaps a pause during a tea gathering or theater visit. The print's title cartouche and series header are designed in the brocade and lattice patterns characteristic of Kunisada's late 1830s output. The Metropolitan Museum of Art preserves this impression as part of its broad survey of Edo ukiyo-e bijinga, where it demonstrates Kunisada's capacity to extract sustained variation from a constrained set of conventions and props.