A Young Couple Visiting a Shrine

This eighteenth-century hashira-e from the Art Institute of Chicago places a young couple, almost certainly a pair of fashionable Edo townspeople, within the narrow vertical confines of a pillar print. The hashira-e format, roughly twenty-eight inches tall by five inches wide, forced Ishikawa Toyonobu into the kind of compositional invention that distinguishes his oeuvre: the two figures are stacked one slightly behind the other, their kimono sleeves overlapping in a way that knits them visually into a single elongated silhouette. A shrine gate or torii is implied rather than fully shown, with the architecture providing context at the upper margin while the figures dominate the central register. The line work is characteristic of Toyonobu in its long unbroken curves, particularly in the trailing hem of the woman's outer robe and the calligraphic sweep of the man's obi sash. Color woodblock printing, present here in the form of soft chromatic accents, places the sheet in the benizuri-e era of the 1740s to 1750s, when Toyonobu was among the leading practitioners of the new multi-block color technique. Shrine visits were a common pretext for courtship scenes in ukiyo-e, providing visual cover for the depiction of intimate companionship in public space, and the print belongs to a broader genre of Edo amorous imagery in which faith and flirtation are inseparably entwined. The Art Institute of Chicago's holdings of Toyonobu hashira-e make it one of the indispensable American collections for the study of the format.