Women on a Fishing Boat

The left sheet of an ōban triptych in the Art Institute of Chicago's collection, this design (c. 1780–1800) shows a group of women aboard a fishing boat, part of a larger composition whose right and center sheets are catalogued separately under the same accession sequence. The subject belongs to a popular late-Edo genre in which fashionable beauties are transplanted into working or seasonal settings — here a fishing excursion — that allow the artist to depict them in less formal poses than the Yoshiwara would permit. Eishō uses the wide horizontal of the triptych format to spread the figures across the boat, balancing standing and seated postures against the simple geometry of the hull. As is typical of his school, the women are rendered with long oval faces, narrow eyes, and slender necks; the kimono patterns are restrained but precisely cut, with light blues and greens picking up the implied river setting. The print is one of several Eishō multi-sheet designs in the Art Institute that demonstrate his skill at extended pictorial composition beyond the single-figure okubi-e for which he is best known.