Artist: Utagawa Kunisada I / Toyokuni III 歌川国貞・三代豊国 (1786–1865), signed Toyokuni ga 豊国画 in the toshidama cartouche; the inset landscape signed by a pupil of the studio (reading consistent with Kunihisa II 国久画) Title: Senju 千住, from the series Edo meisho hyakunin bijo 江戸名所百人美女 ("One Hundred Beautiful Women at Famous Places in Edo") — series cartouche upper right Technique: Nishiki-e (full-colour woodblock print) on washi Format: Ōban tate-e, single sheet, approx. 35 × 24 cm as trimmed Date: 1858 (Ansei 5), with aratame and horse-year date seal Genre: Bijin-ga with meisho inset — late-Edo beauty print ---------------------------------------- Paper & condition Good impression with fair colours. A few minor wormholes in the margins and some trimming. Otherwise sound. Please study the images. -------------------------------------------- About the print Late at night in a room at Senju. A woman in a red-striped robe over a bold black-and-white Benkei-gōshi check leans down over the andon, one hand at her sash with a folded paper, about to put the lamp out; her lacquered pillow and a tobacco tray with its fire-holder and cup are already set out on the floor beside her, and she is barefoot on the green-shaded matting. Kunisada gets the whole hour of the day out of two objects and a posture — the standing lamp screening half her figure, the floor gone green in the failing light. The inset cartouche at the upper left, contributed by a pupil of the studio in the collaborative manner of this series, gives the place: Senju, the first post station on the road north out of Edo across the Sumida, and one of the four staging towns ringing the city whose inns were as famous for their women as for their beds. Edo meisho hyakunin bijo ran to a hundred designs across 1857 and 1858 and is the most sustained achievement of Kunisada's last years — each sheet pairing a woman caught in an unguarded domestic moment with a small view of the district she belongs to.