Back to Back, from a series of 12 prints

Held in the Art Institute of Chicago and dated to circa 1700, this ōban sumizuri-e print attributed to Furuyama Moroshige forms part of a series of twelve sheets, a serial format that the late seventeenth-century [ukiyo-e](/glossary/ukiyo-e) market was beginning to develop into a commercial mainstay. The subject — two figures shown back to back — captures the kind of compositional inventiveness the Hishikawa school brought to intimate two-figure genre subjects, with the contrasting orientations of the figures inviting the viewer to read narrative tension and emotional content from posture and gesture rather than from facial expression alone. Printed in single-block black ink without subsequent hand-coloring, the work demonstrates the late seventeenth-century sumizuri-e aesthetic in which confident draftsmanship and dense textile patterning carried the full pictorial weight of the composition. The series format anticipates the eighteenth-century development of multi-sheet ukiyo-e series and the more elaborate serial schemes that artists from Suzuki Harunobu through Utagawa Hiroshige would eventually develop into the dominant organizing principle of the print trade. The Art Institute example, with its attribution to Furuyama Moroshige (the alternative surname that the Hishikawa school used for Moroshige in some workshop attributions), helps document the artist's late-career engagement with the serial format and his continuing transmission of Moronobu's intimate genre vocabulary into the opening years of the eighteenth century.