Feeding the Carp at Kameido

Isoda Koryusai's "Feeding the Carp at Kameido," a chuban nishiki-e of about 1766, places two fashionably dressed women at the edge of one of the famous garden ponds of Kameido on the eastern edge of Edo. The Kameido area, associated with the Tenmangu shrine, its wisteria arbors and its drum bridges, was already in the 1760s one of the most heavily worked meisho subjects in Edo ukiyo-e, and Koryusai uses it here as a setting in which to stage a quiet act of leisure, the scattering of feed for the heavy ornamental carp that filled the temple ponds. Working as a Harunobu successor in the moment immediately after the 1765 nishiki-e revolution, Koryusai handles the figures in the slim, child-scaled idiom of Suzuki Harunobu and pairs them with a low-keyed landscape background, a compositional balance that distinguishes his Meiwa-era bijin-ga from the more emphatically figural designs of the Katsukawa school. The Art Institute of Chicago impression preserves the soft early-nishiki palette of olive, salmon and indigo, with the careful registration that period collectors prized. Within the broader Edo print tradition, the print is a useful early example of the meisho-bijin-ga compound, the picture of a beautiful woman set at a famous place, that became one of the central formats of late eighteenth-century ukiyo-e.