Young Man on a Horse

Catalogued by the Art Institute of Chicago as a color woodblock print of oban format dated to around the 1760s, this image of a Young Man on a Horse belongs to the late phase of Ishikawa Toyonobu's career, when the benizuri-e palette was being supplanted by the full polychrome nishiki-e of Suzuki Harunobu. The mounted youth, identifiable by the long forelock and shaved pate of the wakashu, occupies the rectangular oban sheet in a relaxed three-quarter view that allowed Toyonobu to display both the rider's elegant figure and the horse's groomed musculature. The composition follows the long tradition of equestrian ukiyo-e that descends from Kano-school painting models, but the lightness of touch and the emphasis on textile patterns are unmistakably Toyonobu's. The wide curving line of the horse's flank acts as a counterweight to the verticality of the rider, balancing the picture in a way that recalls the figural geometry of his earlier hashira-e. The sheet is one of the relatively few late prints in which Toyonobu engaged the secular equestrian subject favored by Torii and later artists like Kiyonaga, and its restrained color suggests the transitional benizuri-e palette giving way to fuller polychrome printing.