An Auspicious Dream

An Auspicious Dream, designed by Isoda Koryusai in 1770, draws on the long Japanese tradition of hatsuyume, the first dream of the new year, whose content was held to portend the dreamer's fortunes over the coming twelve months. The most auspicious sequence — Fuji, then a hawk, then aubergine — became a stock motif of new-year prints, songs and poetry. Koryusai stages the dream device through a sleeping figure, most likely a young woman or courtesan, with a dream cloud or cartouche hovering above her containing the auspicious images themselves. The print belongs to a wider repertoire of yume-e (dream pictures) that Koryusai cultivated alongside his Edo bijin-ga; the device of the dream balloon allowed him to compress multiple symbolic registers into a single sheet and to introduce a contemplative interior dimension into the otherwise external world of the floating-world print. Such psychological staging anticipates the way he would later individuate the named courtesans of the Hinagata Wakana no Hatsumoyo fashion series with subtle narrative gestures and seasonal attributes. The Art Institute of Chicago impression (object 89151) is a chuban nishiki-e with warm ochres and rose for the sleeping figure's bedding, indigo bokashi above her head, and the symbolic dream content rendered in fine keyblock outline within a softly graded cloud. As both a new-year print and an exercise in narrative compression, An Auspicious Dream is an exemplary statement of the way Koryusai used the resources of polychrome printing to bring calendrical observance and the interior life of his subjects into the same disciplined visual surface. Source: Art Institute of Chicago, https://www.artic.edu/artworks/89151.