Courtesan Admiring Morning Glories while Cleaning Her Teeth

Courtesan Admiring Morning Glories while Cleaning Her Teeth, designed by Isoda Koryusai in 1770, juxtaposes two of the most evocative motifs of late-summer Edo life: the asagao morning glory, blooming briefly with the dawn, and the daily ritual of tooth-cleaning with a small chewing stick of green willow, performed at the edge of a veranda or wash-basin. The courtesan, identified by her elaborate hair ornaments and trailing uchikake as an inhabitant of the Yoshiwara, pauses with her toothpick in hand to admire a trellis or potted vine of morning glories. Koryusai uses the moment to compose a tightly observed Edo bijin-ga that yokes domestic intimacy to the seasonal poetics of asagao, themselves a familiar motif of haikai and waka verse. The combination of bodily routine and floral attention — a courtesan caught between hygiene and aesthetic appreciation — anticipates the kind of small, named narrative gestures that Koryusai would later use to individuate his Yoshiwara women in the Hinagata Wakana no Hatsumoyo series of fashion plates for the publisher Nishimuraya Yohachi. The Art Institute of Chicago impression (object 23317) is a chuban nishiki-e with the morning glories rendered in fine blues and violets, the trellis structured in green keyblock lines, and the courtesan's uchikake set off in warm reds and ochres. The print exemplifies the way Koryusai, around 1770, increasingly used environmental motifs — flowers, screens, plants — to root his bijin-ga in specific moments of the Edo summer day. Source: Art Institute of Chicago, https://www.artic.edu/artworks/23317.