A Courtesan with Her Client, the first sheet of an untitled erotic picture album

This sumizuri-e sheet in the Art Institute of Chicago, dated circa 1673 to 1681 and produced as the opening sheet of an untitled erotic picture album, exemplifies Moronobu's foundational role in establishing shunga as a serious pictorial genre. Printed in oban yoko-e format, the horizontal large-format that suited intimate scenes, the work demonstrates the master's command of composition at the scale of single sheets, the very innovation that gave birth to independent ukiyo-e. As the first sheet of an album, this image typically introduced the courtesan and her client in a relatively decorous setting, with subsequent sheets progressing to more explicit content, a sequencing convention Moronobu helped establish. His figural language here, the full-bodied courtesan in lavish layered robes, the client in formal samurai attire, the architectural framing of the Yoshiwara interior, became the visual template that every subsequent shunga artist would adapt. The work also documents the intimate, almost portrait-like attention Moronobu paid to courtesans as individual subjects rather than generic types, an empathy that distinguished his Yoshiwara prints from earlier anonymous illustrations and that would directly influence the bijin-ga tradition through to Utamaro.