Lovers Under a Cherry Tree

Isoda Koryusai's chuban nishiki-e "Lovers Under a Cherry Tree," dated about 1766, sets a young couple in a fragmentary garden landscape beneath a flowering cherry, one of the most heavily worked seasonal motifs of Edo ukiyo-e. The cherry tree is rendered in a few well-judged branches that arch in across the upper portion of the sheet, the blossoms suggested through small touches of pink against an otherwise muted ground. Working as the principal Harunobu successor in the wake of the 1765 nishiki-e revolution, Koryusai treats the figures in the slim, child-scaled idiom of Suzuki Harunobu, with the same restrained palette of olive, salmon and indigo and the same quiet handling of mood. The Meiwa-era bijin-ga vocabulary at which Koryusai now excelled, paired figures, light narrative, classical seasonal cue, is fully deployed here, and the design balances the human encounter against the seasonal landscape with a discipline that would later distinguish his hashira-e pillar prints. The Art Institute of Chicago impression preserves the careful registration and soft early-nishiki pigments of a clean pull. The print is a representative example of Koryusai's Meiwa-period bijin-ga, in which the conventions later codified by his successors, paired lovers, seasonal pivot, restrained palette, were being defined.