Courtesan Holding a Long Pipe

Listed by the Art Institute of Chicago as a hand-colored woodblock print in habahiro hashira-e format and dated to around 1743, this image of a courtesan holding a long pipe is a near-archetypal Ishikawa Toyonobu composition. The pipe, called a kiseru, was a defining accessory of Yoshiwara courtesans, used both for the actual consumption of tobacco and as a prop for the choreography of conversation in the houses of assignation. The pipe's long thin stem mirrors the verticality of the hashira-e format and acts as a graphic device that organizes the courtesan's body, with the gesture of her holding it positioning her shoulders and arms in the slightly mannered posture Toyonobu used to elongate his figures even further. The habahiro hashira-e, the wide pillar print, gave him enough lateral space to develop the full textile patterns of her layered robes, and the resulting tension between the narrow architectural format and the broad geometric kimono pattern is one of the visual pleasures of the sheet. Hand-coloring, applied after the black-line printing, supplies the beni pink at the lips and details and would originally have included additional pigments now somewhat faded. The Art Institute's holding documents the mature urushi-e Toyonobu at the precise moment before he turned decisively to benizuri-e color printing.