Woman Writing a Letter in Front of a Screen

This Art Institute of Chicago hand-colored woodblock print in hashira-e format and sumizuri-e classification, dated to the early 1740s, depicts a woman writing a letter before a folding screen. The composition synthesizes two of the great motifs of Edo ukiyo-e, the literate beauty and the architectural interior of the pleasure quarters, into a single vertical tableau. The folding screen, a byobu, supplies a planar backdrop that Ishikawa Toyonobu uses to flatten the pictorial space and direct attention to the long unrolled scroll of paper on which the woman composes her words. The hashira-e format, a pillar print roughly seventy by twelve centimeters meant to hang on the wooden pillars of Edo town houses, demanded the elongation of the seated figure into a slightly mannered vertical posture, and Toyonobu obliges with a long unbroken curve from the woman's shoulder down through her robes to her gathered legs. Sumizuri-e classification means that the sheet was printed in black ink alone, with any color added by hand; the resulting calligraphic emphasis matches the literary theme of the image. The Art Institute holding documents the hashira-e in its purest sumizuri-e form and remains a primary visual source for the iconography of writing women in mid-Edo bijin-ga.