Isoda Koryūsai

Isoda Koryusai (1735-1790) was one of the most prolific and inventive ukiyo-e bijin-ga masters of the mid-Edo period, a transitional figure who carried the lyrical idiom of Suzuki Harunobu forward into the more sumptuous, full-bodied print style that would dominate the 1770s and 1780s. Working in Edo through the An'ei (1772-1781) and early Tenmei (1781-1789) eras, Koryusai produced an astonishing range of woodblock prints, paintings, and book illustrations, with modern catalogues attributing some 2,500 designs to his hand. He is celebrated above all as Harunobu's most important successor in bijin-ga (pictures of beautiful women), as the supreme master of the hashira-e (pillar print) format, and as the designer of the landmark courtesan series Hinagata Wakana no Hatsumoyo (Models for Fashion: New Designs as Fresh as Young Leaves), one of the most ambitious and long-running ranking series of Yoshiwara courtesans ever produced in ukiyo-e.

Born in 1735, Koryusai began life as a samurai retainer of the Tsuchiya clan, a low-ranking but established warrior family. After the death of the head of his clan he became a ronin (masterless samurai) and settled near the Ryogoku bridge in Edo, in the Yagenbori district. This samurai-class background is a recurring biographical detail that distinguished him from most of his ukiyo-e contemporaries, who tended to come from chonin (townsman) backgrounds, and it accords with the ease he showed both in the samurai and warrior subjects of his earliest prints and, later, in his witty parodies of classical and Chinese moral tales. He signed those early works with the art name Haruhiro, whose 'Haru' element echoed that of Harunobu, and only later adopted the name Koryusai by which he is best known.

Koryusai's career as a printmaker took off in the late 1760s, in the wake of Suzuki Harunobu, the pioneer of the full-color nishiki-e print. Although it is often assumed that Koryusai studied under Harunobu, no direct evidence documents a teacher-pupil relationship between them; what is certain is that his earliest designs, from circa 1769 to 1770, are so close to Harunobu's in figure type, palette, and compositional idiom that they have at times been confused with Harunobu's own work. Slim-waisted, doll-like beauties in delicate pastel kimono; lovers sheltering beneath a single umbrella in the snow; children at play in fashionable musical pastimes, all of these were subjects drawn directly from Harunobu's repertoire. When Harunobu died in 1770, leaving the bijin-ga field without its leading designer, Koryusai stepped into the vacancy with extraordinary energy. Through the early 1770s he absorbed Harunobu's idiom and then began to push it outward, lengthening proportions, intensifying color, and developing a more grounded sense of weight and physical presence in his female figures.

The most distinctive of his formal innovations was his treatment of the hashira-e, or pillar print, a tall, narrow format roughly 28 by 5 inches that was pasted onto the wooden posts of Edo townhouses as cheap, replaceable decor. The format had existed before Koryusai but had been treated essentially as a vertical cropping of an ordinary print. Koryusai reimagined it as a compositional problem of its own, designing figures that wrapped, leaned, and folded into the impossibly narrow column, often with a single tall pine, a hanging robe, or a falling ribbon as a structural spine. His finest pillar prints are model examples of how he turned a constrictive shape into a virtuoso exercise. Modern scholarship credits Koryusai with more hashira-e than any other ukiyo-e artist, at least 350 designs in the format, and his work here remains among the most prized survivals from the An'ei period.

From roughly 1775 onward, Koryusai turned increasingly to the Yoshiwara pleasure quarters for subject matter, and it is in this phase that he produced his single most consequential body of work: Hinagata Wakana no Hatsumoyo, sometimes translated as Models of Fashion: New Designs as Fresh as Young Leaves. Published from about 1776 into the early 1780s and running to roughly 140 large o-ban designs, the series presented each leading courtesan of the Yoshiwara in full standing pose, attended by one or two kamuro (child attendants), and lavishly dressed in the season's newest fabric patterns. The series functioned simultaneously as a portrait gallery of celebrity courtesans, a fashion catalog of textile design, and a ranking guide for connoisseurs. It established a template for the courtesan portrait that Kiyonaga, Utamaro, and Eishi would all build upon in the next two decades, and it consolidated Koryusai's reputation as a designer of bijin-ga at the highest level of fashion-system sophistication.

Koryusai was also a designer of beautifully observed kacho-ga (bird-and-flower prints), including chuban-format studies that survive in particularly fresh impressions in major collections such as the Art Institute of Chicago. He produced topographical series in the Eight Views (hakkei) tradition, fashion parodies of classical Komachi poems and of Chinese moral exemplars, twelve-month and twelve-zodiac series, and a sustained body of shunga. His engagement with the mitate (parody) genre, retelling famous warrior episodes or moral tales in contemporary Edo dress, gave his middle-period prints their characteristic wit.

In the early 1780s, at the height of his commercial success, Koryusai turned away from print design and shifted his energies to painting on silk and paper. In 1782 he received the honorary Buddhist title hokkyo (Bridge of the Law), an unusually distinguished rank for an ukiyo-e artist, and the shift to painting reflected both a desire for higher-status commissions and a generational handover of the bijin-ga print market to Torii Kiyonaga. Koryusai's paintings, which survive in far fewer numbers than his prints, return to the Yoshiwara subjects he had made his own in a more restrained manner. He died in Edo in 1790, leaving behind one of the deepest and most varied print oeuvres of the eighteenth century.

For collectors and students of ukiyo-e today, Isoda Koryusai occupies a pivotal position: the artist who transmitted Harunobu's intimate world of beauties into the more ambitious large-format prints of the late eighteenth century, the supreme master of the pillar print, and the designer whose Hinagata Wakana series helped define the courtesan portrait for a generation. His chuban-format Edo prints, with their delicate color registers and slim Harunobu-derived figures, remain among the most rewarding entry points into mid-Edo bijin-ga.