Karauta of the Ogiya in Evening Snow (Ogiya Karauta bosetsu), from the series "Eight Views of Famous Beauties of the Pleasure Quarters (Seiro meifu hakkei)"
- Date:
- c. 1773/75
- Medium:
- Color woodblock print; chuban
- Source:
- Art Institute of Chicago
Karauta of the Ogiya in Evening Snow (Ogiya Karauta bosetsu) belongs to Isoda Koryusai's 1768 series Eight Views of Famous Beauties of the Pleasure Quarters (Seiro meifu hakkei), one of his most ambitious early projects in mitate-e. The cycle adapts the Eight Views of Xiao and Xiang, the classical Chinese landscape program already domesticated in Japan as the Eight Views of Omi, into a programmatic portrait gallery of Yoshiwara courtesans, each oiran identified by name and house. Here the celebrated Karauta of the Ogiya house is matched with bosetsu, evening snow, the title that traditionally conjures a hushed twilight under falling flakes. Koryusai poses the courtesan in heavy winter robes within or near a snow-blanketed setting; the bijin's stature, formidable hair ornaments and patterned uchikake mark the highest grade of the pleasure quarters, and her name in the cartouche functions as a kind of celebrity tag for Edo connoisseurs of the licensed district. The print stands at a formative point in Koryusai's career, in which his work on courtesan-themed nishiki-e laid the groundwork for the spectacular Hinagata Wakana no Hatsumoyo series produced with publisher Nishimuraya Yohachi in the late 1770s. The Art Institute of Chicago impression (object 21279) is a chuban colour woodblock with carefully gradated grey skies, white-reserve snowfall and saturated indigo, rose and ochre across the robes. Within Edo bijin-ga, the Seiro meifu hakkei series demonstrates how Koryusai could weld classical landscape conventions to portrait celebrity culture in the Yoshiwara, producing prints prized by collectors both as visual entertainment and as historical documents of named women of the licensed quarter. Source: Art Institute of Chicago, https://www.artic.edu/artworks/21279.
Woodblock print
Woodblock print
20th century
Woodblock print; ink and color on paper
19th century
Ukiyo-e woodblock print; ink and color on paper
Karauta of the Ogiya in Evening Snow (Ogiya Karauta bosetsu), from the series "Eight Views of Famous Beauties of the Pleasure Quarters (Seiro meifu hakkei)" was created by Isoda Koryūsai (礒田湖龍斎) in c. 1773/75.
Karauta of the Ogiya in Evening Snow (Ogiya Karauta bosetsu), from the series "Eight Views of Famous Beauties of the Pleasure Quarters (Seiro meifu hakkei)" depicts winter.
