Eavesdropping

Eavesdropping, designed by Isoda Koryusai in 1768, captures a slyly intimate Edo bijin-ga scene in which a young woman pauses behind a screen or sliding door to listen in on a conversation taking place in the next room. The voyeuristic pleasure of the listener is doubled by the print itself, which positions the viewer behind her shoulder, sharing her secret access to the unseen speakers. Koryusai had been working closely in the circle of Suzuki Harunobu, and Eavesdropping shows him already developing the more grounded sense of body weight and gesture that would distinguish his maturing Edo bijin-ga from Harunobu's dreamlike figures. The slim young woman, her head tilted toward the partition, allows the artist to display the long curving line of a heavily patterned kosode and obi against the simple architecture of an Edo interior. The motif of overheard conversation belongs to a broad culture of erotic and humorous suggestion in mid-eighteenth-century floating-world prints; in Koryusai's hands the implied narrative anchors the composition without making it explicit. The mature expression of this sensitivity to body and situation would emerge in the Hinagata Wakana no Hatsumoyo courtesan series of the late 1770s, where named oiran are similarly given small narrative gestures within their elaborate ensembles. The Art Institute of Chicago impression (object 89140) is a chuban nishiki-e with carefully registered indigo, rose and yellow, the keyblock preserved cleanly, and the textile patterns embossed in karazuri. The print stands as an early demonstration of Koryusai's gift for combining the formal demands of bijin-ga with the social subtext of overheard speech and private observation. Source: Art Institute of Chicago, https://www.artic.edu/artworks/89140.