Young Woman with Umbrella

Recorded by the Art Institute of Chicago as a hand-colored woodblock print in wide hashira-e format and urushi-e classification dating to the 1740s, this image of a young woman with an umbrella showcases Ishikawa Toyonobu's mastery of the habahiro hashira-e format. The umbrella, called a karakasa or wagasa, was both a practical accessory and one of the most graphic of pictorial props, its radial geometry providing a visual contrast to the linear flow of robe and figure. Toyonobu sets the open umbrella behind and above the woman so that its circular form crowns her head like a halo, a compositional move he repeated in several wide hashira-e and which became a touchstone of subsequent ukiyo-e bijin imagery. The wide pillar print format, slightly broader than the standard hashira-e, allowed him to develop the textile patterns of her kimono without sacrificing the vertical proportions on which the genre depends. Urushi-e classification indicates the use of lustrous black lacquer-like accents and hand-applied pigments, supplying the rose, ochre, and green that the black-line printing would otherwise have left bare. The Art Institute sheet is an important specimen of the wide hashira-e in its richly hand-colored urushi-e mode.