Attracting her attention

Isoda Koryusai produced "Attracting Her Attention" around 1766, in the early Meiwa-era flowering of small-format Edo ukiyo-e bijin-ga. The chuban nishiki-e shows a young man using one of the standard narrative gestures of the genre, a glance, a turn, a small object held up, to draw the eye of a young woman who is at first absorbed in another task. Koryusai stages the encounter in the slender Harunobu figure type, with the lightly comic, almost balletic pacing that the period's collectors associated with luxury full-color prints. As the principal Harunobu successor at the moment when nishiki-e had just been introduced to Edo, he is working very close to his teacher's idiom here, but the firmer contour, slightly more grounded figure and quietly illustrational interior already hint at the more sober sensibility of his mature output. The Art Institute of Chicago impression preserves the soft palette of salmon, olive and pale indigo characteristic of the first generation of multi-block nishiki-e, when colour was still treated as a costly novelty by Edo publishers. Prints of this kind, sold either as single sheets or as parts of small thematic groups, formed the working currency of the commercial print market in the second half of the 1760s. "Attracting Her Attention" is a representative example of Koryusai's bijin-ga before his shift, in the early 1770s, to the larger oban fashion plates and hashira-e pillar prints for which he is now principally remembered.