The floating world at dusk. Ōi of the Ebiya was a high-ranking courtesan, but the real signature on this one is the artist. Keisai Eisen was the master of the late-Edo "decadent" beauty — and where an earlier artist like Utamaro idealised his women into serene grace, Eisen made his sultry, knowing, a little world-weary, with a heavy-lidded sensuality that matched the twilight mood of a pleasure quarter past its prime. He knew the territory intimately: a famously raffish character who ran a brothel himself for a time, drank hard, and wrote a tell-all chronicle of the artists of his day. He painted the floating world from the inside, with all its glamour and its fatigue.

The triptych sets its beauties among fuyō — the mallow, or cotton-rose hibiscus — a bloom long used in poetry as a metaphor for a lovely woman, and one that famously opens and fades within a single day. It's the perfect emblem for the world Eisen painted: dazzling, sensual, and quietly shadowed by its own transience.

The Courtesan Ōi of Ebi-ya (海老屋内大井), from the triptych Fuyō Senshi Bijin Kurabe (芙蓉千姿美人競, Beauties in their Finery amid Mallow Flowers) c1830.

Keisai Eisen (渓斎英泉, 1790-1848)