Clearing Weather of the Fan (Ogi no seiran), from the series "Fashionable Parodies of the Eight Parlor Views (Furyu mitate zashiki hakkei)"

Clearing Weather of the Fan (Ogi no seiran) belongs to Isoda Koryusai's 1768 series Fashionable Parodies of the Eight Parlor Views (Furyu mitate zashiki hakkei), one of the most ingenious mitate cycles produced in the first wave of nishiki-e. The Eight Views of Xiao and Xiang, a Chinese landscape program adopted into Japanese painting as the Eight Views of Omi, is here miniaturised into a domestic Edo interior: each title is reassigned to an everyday object whose name or shape evokes a famous view. In this sheet the "clearing weather of the mountain pass" becomes the clearing of clouds across a folding fan opened by a young woman in a checkered kosode, the breeze she stirs taking the place of the wind that disperses the mist. Koryusai, working in the orbit of Suzuki Harunobu and absorbing his use of bokashi and embossing, designs the figures with the slender proportions characteristic of late-1760s Edo bijin-ga, but already inflects them with a more substantial physical presence than Harunobu's dreamlike beauties; this firmer grasp on the body would mature in his later Hinagata Wakana fashion-plate series for Tsutaya Juzaburo. The Art Institute of Chicago impression (object 13315) shows the delicate pinks, mustards and indigos typical of early polychrome printing, with karazuri blind-printing visible in the patterned ground. As a mitate the print rewards close attention: every domestic detail, from the fan's design to the woman's pose, is a deliberate pun on a classical landscape motif, and the series as a whole confirms Koryusai's command of the layered, allusive humour that Edo's literate audience prized. Source: Art Institute of Chicago, https://www.artic.edu/artworks/13315.