Even a darting glance at portraits of actors and of the reigning courtesans of the pleasure districts -- the subjects favored most by the ukiyo-e artists and their patrons -- suggests that together these two present a view of kindred sides of the same theatrical coin.

In the performing arts of self-presentation commonly engaged in by both, actors and professional beauties alike were constrained by canonical rules governing matters of dress, mask-like makeup, hair styles often hyperbolic in geometric design, and gestures as choreographed as any observed in classical dance. In the case of the one we can observe images of frozen intensities, in the other, aspects of a composed serenity (with occasional glimpses, however demure, of eroticism) no less formally determined.

The choice of women subjects was at first confined to those courtesans of high rank but in time artists also came to portray geisha (professional performers of music and dance, primarily), women who worked in the teahouses, popular girls in local towns, and lower-ranking prostitutes.

Well-known courtesans were accorded an acclaim and adulation not unlike that showered today upon anointed megastars and high-wattage fashion models. Indeed, an esteemed courtesan's progress through the streets commanded an array of admiring fans thronging to behold her in all her bedizened particulars, no less agog than any audience come to take in the latest couturier show or boxoffice boffo at the theatre.

As was true of women in Classical Greece of a similar station, and later the courts of Western Europe, rarely was it enough to be merely beautiful to assure admiration. By their clientele of important samurai, nobles of the court, and members of the burgeoning merchant class of the Edo era, it was expected that courtesans of quality display erudition and skill in all arts traditionally once the distinction of the court and aristocracy alone. These of course included knowledge of the Four Accomplishments -- calligraphy, music, painting, and go -- as well as the literary classics, dance, flower arrangement and the tea ceremony.

Not least among the accomplishments required was that she be adept in intelligent conversation on a broad array of subjects. Of a similar order, it was mandatory there be on hand among the accoutrements of a courtesan's apartment equipment for playing go, shogi (Japanese chess) and sugoraku (the Japanese version of pachisi, a game similar to backgammon), these comprising the three games of Japanese tradition. We can surmise that such activities at the board, and in particular games of go as frequently depicted by the artists of the floating world, constituted the other game in which men and women engaged together on an equal footing.

During the Edo period brothels could be licensed only in restricted areas -- the so-called gay quarters (the adjective should not be construed in the current sense of homosexual). The most important of these was the Yoshiwara district in Edo (the old name for Tokyo), center of the courtesan's world and location of countless and varied establishments, teahouses, and theatres. Not merely an amusement center, Yoshiwara became a Mecca of importance from which poured forth in abundance much of Japan's culture of the period -- ukiyo-e, plays and poetry. This rich mix of creative stew and social vitality is why artists lavished time there, drawn as well to the gamut of available subjects to gratify a public appetite keen to purchase at little cost an endless stream of new images of old and up-and-coming favorites.

In the early 1840s reforms were imposed and laws established intending social improvement and forbidding theatrical, literary or artistic reproduction of identifiable subjects. Within such constraints all the elaborations and contrivances of artifice were directed toward creating illustrations of an aesthetic that was idealized and rigorously stylized.

No less than actors, a courtesan's theatre of performance relied on opulence of elegant artifice. Not a faithful likeness or expressed emotions of any individual subject's face was valued so much as an image of impassive timelessness into which absence of emotion the viewer could infuse his own. Collaborating with such imaginings was the display of garments of sumptuous colors and richness of fabric, design and pattern draped sinuously about the female form in flowing arabesques often echoed by visual rhymes of extravagant coiffures in arrangments like sculpted meringue. Such a splendor of sensuous concoctions naturally roused the admiration of the fans and of artists as eager to translate these as was the public avid to acquire them.

The great masters of this painting style of the Japanese tradition of bijinga (pictures of beautiful women) -- often produced as a series -- were Suzuki Harunobo (1724-70), Torii Kiyonaga (1752-1815), and esteemed especially, Kitagawa Utamaro (1754-1806). These and others were sometimes copied by the French Impressionists and later artists, among them notably Van Gogh, who avidly collected prints. Other artists mining this vein were mainly imitators of these three.

The originator of nishiki-e (many-colored prints) was Harunobu, who depicted women as dolls in a world of fantasy. Kiyonaga's beauties were rendered with a special system of proportion known as hattoshin -- the subject's body being divided into eight parts. Kiyonaga was particularly regarded for the realism of his background scenes. Utamaro concentrated on half-length and bust portraits, and was noted for outlining the features of the face which, with decoratively designed hair and gorgeously lavish robes, created a sweeping composition, as well as for the emphasis he gave to facial expression, although casual Western viewers may find it difficult at times to discern variation.