The Yoshiwara in Edo - A Set of Three (Edo Yoshiwara sanpukutsui)

This Art Institute of Chicago hand-colored woodblock print is the left sheet of a toku-oban triptych, dated to about 1736 to 1744 and titled Edo Yoshiwara sanpukutsui, or The Yoshiwara in Edo - A Set of Three. The sanpukutsui, a triptych of related but discrete sheets meant to be appreciated together, was one of Ishikawa Toyonobu's preferred compositional structures, and he deployed it repeatedly to organize beauties of the licensed quarter into coordinated tableaux. Toku-oban indicates the larger oban format favored for prestigious sheets, and the beni-e categorization records that the print was hand-colored with safflower-derived pink pigment after printing, the dominant chromatic mode in the brief window before benizuri-e color printing reorganized the market. The Yoshiwara, established in 1617 and relocated north of Edo after the Meireki fire of 1657, was by Toyonobu's time the most famous of the bakufu-licensed pleasure quarters and the central engine of ukiyo-e iconography. The left sheet here shows a single courtesan and her attendants engaged in a moment of leisure that the original viewer would have read in dialogue with the central and right sheets of the same set. As a relatively early Toyonobu sheet from a hand-colored triptych in the Art Institute collection, this print is a key document of the urushi-e and beni-e era immediately preceding the color-printing revolution he himself would help drive.