Osome and Hisamatsu, from the series "Beauties in Joruri Roles (Bijin awase joruri kagami)"

This oban color woodblock print from the Art Institute of Chicago, dated to about 1795, belongs to Ichirakutei Eisui's series Beauties in Joruri Roles (Bijin awase joruri kagami), in which contemporary Yoshiwara beauties are paired with celebrated roles from the joruri puppet theater. The subject is the ill-fated romance of Osome and Hisamatsu, one of the most popular love-suicide narratives in late-Edo theatrical literature, drawn from the tragedy of a young townsman and the merchant's daughter whose union was forbidden by their families. By casting the lovers as paired beauties in the format of a brothel-quarter print, Eisui follows the late-eighteenth-century convention of mitate or 'parallels,' in which an iconographically loaded subject from theater or classical poetry is restaged in the visual idiom of the floating world. The result is a print that operates simultaneously as a portrait of a glamorous courtesan and as a knowing literary reference. Eisui's elongated figural type, drawn from the Chobunsai Eishi school, lends itself to the lyrical pathos of the joruri subject, and the Art Institute's impression preserves the careful color and line that mark his most accomplished work.