Begging for Alms

Isoda Koryusai produced "Begging for Alms" in 1766, very early in his career as a designer of Edo ukiyo-e and at the moment when he was working most closely in the manner of Suzuki Harunobu. The print belongs to the dense early-Meiwa-era output of chuban nishiki-e through which Koryusai built his reputation as the principal Harunobu successor, before turning to the larger oban bijin-ga and hashira-e formats with which he is now more commonly associated. The image shows a religious mendicant, a kanjin solicitor or itinerant nun, accepting an offering from a young woman in front of a domestic gate. Koryusai uses the slim, child-scaled figure type that Harunobu had popularised, with the same delicate linework, restrained palette of olive, salmon, and indigo, and the same emphasis on a quiet, lightly comic narrative encounter between figures of mismatched status. The Art Institute of Chicago impression retains the soft pigments characteristic of the best Meiwa-period nishiki-e, when the recently perfected full-color woodblock technique was still being treated as a luxury novelty by Edo collectors. Prints of this kind, sold individually or in small thematic groups, formed the everyday currency of Edo ukiyo-e publishing in the years immediately following the 1765 nishiki-e revolution. "Begging for Alms" stands as a record of Koryusai working at the height of the Harunobu idiom from which he would soon depart.