Girl Playing a Prank on a Young Man who is Napping

An Art Institute of Chicago chuban print dated to about 1769, this design captures a moment of domestic mischief: a young woman leaning over a sleeping youth, evidently in the act of teasing or surprising him. The scene belongs to the wider genre of intimate genre prints in which Koryusai, following Harunobu, used minor narrative incidents to anchor a study of two figures in close proximity. The bedding, the screen, and the carefully patterned kimono all carry the muted Harunobu-derived palette that defined Koryusai's earliest mature work, while the slightly more solid handling of the seated young man's torso shows the direction in which Koryusai was already pushing the figure type. Prints of this kind found a ready market with Edo connoisseurs who valued ukiyo-e for its evocation of romantic and erotic narrative without the explicitness of shunga.