Courtesan Standing Behind Screen and Young Man Smoking

Isoda Koryusai designed this chuban nishiki-e of a courtesan standing behind a folding screen while a young man smokes in the foreground around 1766. The composition is structured as a frame-within-frame, the painted folding screen dividing the picture surface into two slim vertical bands and concentrating the eye on the half-hidden figure of the courtesan. Working as the principal Harunobu successor in the early years of nishiki-e printing, Koryusai handles the subject in the slim, lyrical figure type of Suzuki Harunobu, with the same restrained palette of olive, salmon and pale indigo. The motif of the half-glimpsed courtesan and the seated client is a stock setting of Edo ukiyo-e bijin-ga, evoking the licensed quarters of the Yoshiwara without naming them explicitly, and Koryusai uses the screen here both as a piece of fashionable interior furniture and as a compositional device that anticipates the strict vertical organisation of his later hashira-e pillar prints. The Art Institute of Chicago impression preserves the soft early-nishiki palette and the clean key-block linework that Edo collectors associated with the new full-color technique. The print is one of a substantial group of Meiwa-period chuban bijin-ga in which Koryusai laid the technical and iconographic groundwork for the much larger oban Yoshiwara fashion plates that would dominate his output a decade later.