Man and Woman at New Year

Man and Woman at New Year, an Isoda Koryusai print of about 1770 in the Victoria and Albert Museum, places the artist's Edo bijin-ga style at the service of one of the most heavily worked subjects in the ukiyo-e calendar: the celebration of the first days of the year. The pair are shown in formal dress, the woman carrying or attending to an object associated with shogatsu observance, the man at her side, their stances calibrated so that the composition reads as a balanced double portrait rather than a narrative scene. New Year prints sold in volume in Edo each winter, both as ephemeral decoration for the season and as souvenirs of the auspicious imagery believed to invite good fortune through the threshold of the year. Koryusai trained in the Kano school before entering the ukiyo-e milieu under Suzuki Harunobu, and Man and Woman at New Year shows him working with the smaller-figure, intimate-scale conventions that Harunobu had codified, while gradually adding the firmer outlines and more documentary textile description that would become his signature later in the decade. The print precedes by a few years the publication of his fashion atlas Hinagata Wakana no Hatsumoyo, but it shares the project's interest in costume as a structuring subject rather than as mere ornament: the wave-and-pine motifs on the kimono, the obi knot, the formal hairstyling all carry the weight of the picture. The Victoria and Albert Museum catalogues the impression as a Koryusai design of around 1770, dating it to the transitional moment after Harunobu's death when Koryusai assumed the leading role in Edo bijin-ga and began to develop the working methods that would define his most prolific years.