Bijinga (pictures of beautiful women)

Women have been painted since early times, but they came to be painted in great numbers in the ukiyo-e of the Edo period, when such pictures were called bijin-e or onna-e. In ukiyo-e, what mattered was less whether the picture looked like the woman herself than which artist's type she was drawn in: Suzuki Harunobu's slight, girlish women, Torii Kiyonaga's tall women with long limbs, Kitagawa Utamaro's close-up busts. In modern nihonga after the Meiji era, bijinga became the name of a genre, and Kaburaki Kiyokata in Tokyo and Uemura Shōen in Kyoto were spoken of together as “Shōen in the west, Kiyokata in the east.” In the Taishō era Takehisa Yumeji joined an ukiyo-e-like manner to Taishō romanticism, and his women with large, wistful eyes, called Yumeji-style beauties, won wide popularity.

Look beyond the face: the pattern of the kimono, the hairstyle, what she holds, the flowers and grasses around her. Which of them tell you the season, or how she lives?

Where does the beauty in this picture lie: in the face, or in the gesture and dress?

• Ukiyo-e 浮世絵→Harunobu's bijinga became popular as full-color nishiki-e prints took hold.
• Nihonga 日本画→Kiyokata and Shōen painted in nihonga.