Courtesans

A picture of women at leisure on a verandah and in the garden of a house. The picture on the right shows a woman sitting on the verandah playing a shamisen while below her are a woman holding a long pipe together with a woman holding red and white flowers in her hands, both of their gazes focusing on the same spot. The left-hand picture depicts a child and woman raising their hands and stretching upwards towards a bird which is tethered by a red string, at the top is a woman with a fan leaning against a rock, all three of them are watching the bird. The women share a particular shape of face, with plump cheeks and long chin, that is typical of the figures painted by IWASA Matabei and their stance with arched backs would also point to the possibility that this work was produced by him.
The unnatural expressions on the women’s faces, the fact that the left and right pictures lack continuity combined with traces of the paper having been joined at some point would seem to indicate that originally both of these paintings were part of a single large work. Some of the gold and silver leaf in the blank areas would also appear to be a later addition. With the exception of the young girl, the courtesans all have the hyogo-mage hairstyle, their kimonos have large designs of circles, butterflies or small diamond shapes, and together with their narrow obi they are typical of the beautiful women who appear in paintings of the Kan’ei period (1624 - 44).