The Courtesan Takigawa of the Ōgiya Brothel, from the series Seven Beautiful Komachi

The Courtesan Takigawa of the Ogiya Brothel, from the series Seven Beautiful Komachi, dated 1784, is an early bijin-ga woodblock print by Utagawa Toyokuni in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The subject is Takigawa, a celebrated courtesan of the Ogiya, one of the most prestigious houses in the Yoshiwara, paired through the series device with one of the seven canonical scenes of the legendary Heian poet Ono no Komachi. The mitate Komachi series was a long-running format in Edo ukiyo-e, allowing designers to map the high-cultural Komachi cycle onto the celebrated beauties of the present-day Yoshiwara, layering classical poetic resonance with contemporary glamour. In 1784 Toyokuni was a young designer at the start of his career; the print predates his mature consolidation of the Utagawa school's commercial dominance and shows him absorbing the prevailing Kiyonaga manner of tall, dignified beauties even as he developed the distinctive figural emphasis that would mark his later yakusha-e and bijin-ga. The Metropolitan Museum of Art preserves the design within its substantial Utagawa-school holdings and documents the title, courtesan identity, and series attribution in its catalogue. As a benchmark of Toyokuni's youthful production, the work illustrates how the Utagawa school first established itself in the bijin market that would later be reshaped under his own influence.