Three Beauties of the Present Day

Three celebrated beauties of 1790s Edo—the teahouse waitress Naniwaya Kita, the teahouse waitress Takashima Hisa, and the geisha Tomimoto Toyohina—are arranged in a triangular cluster against a shimmering ground of mica-dusted mica. Kitagawa Utamaro, the greatest master of bijin-ga (pictures of beautiful women), renders their faces almost identically, so that the viewer must read personality from the subtlest inflections of eye, mouth, and crest. The print is the defining example of Utamaro's idealized, intimate female portraiture, which fixed the image of feminine beauty in the golden age of ukiyo-e. Fine impressions are held at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and other collections.