Reading a Letter

Held in the Art Institute of Chicago and dated to circa 1688, Reading a Letter is an ōban sumizuri-e print that exemplifies the intimate two-figure genre composition the Hishikawa school developed at the turn of the Genroku era. Moroshige's composition shows a pair of figures absorbed in the act of reading a letter together, treating an everyday moment of correspondence with the close attention to facial expression, gesture, and textile pattern that defined late seventeenth-century Edo [ukiyo-e](/glossary/ukiyo-e). The sumizuri-e technique — ink printing from a single block, without subsequent hand-coloring — was the dominant mode of single-sheet ukiyo-e in the 1680s and 1690s, and Moroshige's confident black-line draftsmanship demonstrates his command of the Hishikawa school's foundational graphic vocabulary, with the figures' robes patterned in the dense geometric and floral motifs that announce a fashionable urban setting. The subject of letter-reading carried strong romantic implications in Edo-period visual culture, where the bunpitsu (literary brush) and correspondence between lovers was a recurrent theme across painting, woodblock printing, and popular literature. The Art Institute example helps document Moroshige's mature command of single-sheet composition during the height of the Genroku cultural moment and his role as a transmitter of Moronobu's pictorial vocabulary to the generation of artists who would carry ukiyo-e into the eighteenth century.