Poem by Bun'ya no Yasuhide, from the series "Modern Versions of the Six Immortal Poets (Imayo fuzoku rokkasen)"

Poem by Bun'ya no Yasuhide, from the 1771 series Modern Versions of the Six Immortal Poets (Imayo fuzoku rokkasen), is a woodblock print by Isoda Koryusai that exemplifies the mitate sensibility at the heart of mid-Edo bijin-ga. The Rokkasen, or Six Immortal Poets, were a canonical group of ninth-century Japanese poets named by Ki no Tsurayuki in the preface to the Kokin Wakashu anthology, and they remained throughout the centuries that followed an obligatory subject for any artist with literary ambitions. Bun'ya no Yasuhide, the obscurest member of the group and a master of clever wordplay, is here recast in Koryusai's series as a fashionable Edo woman, with the original poem inscribed above the figure and the contemporary subject positioned in the role the classical poet would have occupied. The print depicts a young woman in a moment of pause that visually echoes one of Yasuhide's most famous poems about autumn winds, with the figure's elongated, S-curved silhouette and elegantly arranged kimono providing the modern counterpart to ninth-century poetic dignity. Koryusai's contour drawing is precise, the patterning restrained, and the palette quietly autumnal. The series anticipates the more thoroughgoing fashion focus of his celebrated Hinagata Wakana no Hatsu Moyo project of the later 1770s, where the inscriptions would shift from classical poems to the names of Yoshiwara courtesans. The Art Institute of Chicago preserves this impression among its Koryusai holdings.