Young Woman and Hotei

This Art Institute of Chicago hand-colored woodblock print, classified as a wide hashira-e in sumizuri-e and dated to around 1741, pairs a young woman with Hotei, the cheerfully corpulent god of contentment and one of the seven gods of good fortune in the Shichifukujin pantheon. The wide hashira-e, or habahiro hashira-e, offered Ishikawa Toyonobu more horizontal room than the standard pillar print, and he used the extra width here to set up a comic-romantic dialogue between the slender bijin and the round divinity. Sumizuri-e classification means that the sheet was printed in black ink only, with whatever color was added applied by hand; in practice many sumizuri-e by Toyonobu were left to circulate in essentially monochrome form, where their long sinuous outlines were prized for their calligraphic vitality. Hotei was a particularly common figure in genre scenes of the urushi-e era because his sack of treasures and his cheerful demeanor made him a natural foil for beauties of the floating world. The encounter, with its undertone of gentle eroticism between a young woman and a male body that could not be more visually different from the wakashu of the actor prints, belongs to a tradition of paired comic vignettes that Toyonobu turned to repeatedly. The Art Institute's sheet is an excellent specimen of the wide hashira-e in its sumizuri-e form, recording a configuration of the format relatively rare in Western collections.