Kissing Her Breast

Isoda Koryusai's Kissing Her Breast, preserved by the Victoria and Albert Museum under accession O122609, belongs to the shunga, or erotic print, tradition in which Koryusai was an active and prolific designer alongside his more public Edo bijin-ga output. The composition pairs two figures in an intimate exchange, depicted at close range so that the picture surface is given over to the meeting of bodies, robes, and gestures rather than to architectural or landscape context. Koryusai applies the same drawing conventions that distinguish his standing-courtesan portraits in series like Hinagata Wakana, including the careful layering of patterned textiles, the small-mouthed and elongated face, and the precise rendering of hair and ornament. The shunga tradition allowed Edo printmakers to extend the conventions of bijin-ga into private and sexually explicit registers, and Koryusai's contributions are noted for their handling of textile pattern and pose under conditions of physical contact. The Victoria and Albert Museum's catalogue preserves the title and the attribution to Koryusai, situating the print within the artist's wider engagement with the shunga mode that ran in parallel to his more documentary survey of named courtesans and named houses of the Yoshiwara across the 1770s.