Lovers in Bed, from an untitled series of erotic prints

This chuban-format sheet of about 1766 belongs to an untitled series of erotic prints (shunga) by Isoda Koryusai. Shunga was a parallel and almost universal market within Edo ukiyo-e, produced by virtually every major designer alongside the more public bijin-ga, yakusha-e and kacho-ga, and Koryusai was no exception: a substantial share of his early output is now classed as erotic. The print depicts a pair of lovers in bed, the bedding spread across most of the composition and the figures arranged within it in the close, intertwined pose typical of the genre. Working as the principal Harunobu successor in the early years of full-color nishiki-e, Koryusai treats the subject in the slim, lyrical figure type of Suzuki Harunobu, with the same restrained palette of olive, salmon and indigo. The Art Institute of Chicago impression preserves the careful registration and soft early-nishiki pigments of a clean pull. Within the broader history of Edo ukiyo-e, prints of this kind functioned both as private luxury objects and as more or less open commercial commodities; their formal language, the close framing, the restrained palette, the attentive handling of textile pattern, is the same as that of the period's non-erotic bijin-ga, and Koryusai's shunga of the late 1760s give a clear picture of how the most accomplished bijin-ga designers of the era operated across both registers without aesthetic discontinuity.