Seeing Each Other with a View to Marriage

Seeing Each Other with a View to Marriage by Isoda Koryusai documents the formal miai meeting at which prospective spouses, accompanied by family and go-betweens, were able to observe one another before negotiations could proceed. The Metropolitan Museum of Art preserves the impression that records this design, dating it to around 1780, in the late phase of Koryusai's print career as he turned increasingly toward painted hanging scrolls. The composition arranges the principals across the picture plane with the deliberate stiffness of the ritual itself: a young woman, modestly dressed and accompanied by an older relative, faces a young man with similar attendants, while a sliding screen or low partition organizes the social distance between the two parties. The print belongs to the genre of Edo bijin-ga that engaged with townspeople's lives outside the pleasure quarters, and it provides a useful counterpoint to the Yoshiwara-centered productions for which Koryusai is best known, including his celebrated series Hinagata Wakana Hatsu Moyo. Where that series treats the courtesan as a public emblem of fashion, the miai print treats the unmarried woman as a private object of scrutiny within the family system, and the contrast between the two registers helps illuminate the social range of Koryusai's mature work. For collectors, the design is a relatively rare example of a marriage subject by a major ukiyo-e designer.