Edo Beauties in the Evening

A bijin-ga (beautiful-women picture) by the Utagawa-school designer Utagawa Kunitaka, held at the Edo-Tokyo Museum in the historical museum's substantial collection of late-Tokugawa popular prints. The composition depicts Edo women in an evening setting, a recurring subject of late-Edo bijin-ga that allowed designers to develop the elaborate evening kimono, evening hairstyles, lantern light, and the social rituals of the Edo evening as a sustained pictorial subject. The phrase yū (夕) or yoru (夜) - evening or night - in late-Edo print titles typically signals a composition in which the figures are depicted against a darkened background, often illuminated by lanterns, with the kimono and accessories rendered in the more dramatic palette suitable for low-light interior or street scenes. Bijin-ga remained one of the principal genres of the late-Tokugawa print market even as historical-military and political-ceremonial subjects rose in commercial prominence during the Bakumatsu years, and designers across the Utagawa school - from Kunisada (Toyokuni III) at the top of the workshop hierarchy through dozens of pupils including Kunitaka - continued to supply Edo customers with fashionable single-sheet and multi-sheet prints of well-dressed Edo women in seasonal and social settings. The Edo-Tokyo Museum's holding of Kunitaka prints is one of the principal Japanese-institutional collections of his work, complementing the American holdings at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Kunitaka's bijin-ga production, like his work in other genres, follows the figural style of his master Kunisada, with the elongated standing figures and elaborate kimono drawing that characterise the late-Edo Utagawa school.