Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove - No. 2 (Chikurin shichiken sono ni), from the series "Popular Versions of Sages (Fuzoku kenjin ryaku)"

Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove, No. 2 (Chikurin shichiken sono ni), from the 1771 series Popular Versions of Sages (Fuzoku kenjin ryaku), is a woodblock print by Isoda Koryusai that translates Chinese literati legend into the witty visual vocabulary of Edo bijin-ga. The Seven Sages were a group of third-century Chinese scholar-poets who, weary of the corruption at the Wei court, withdrew to a bamboo grove to drink wine, play music, and discourse on philosophy, becoming over centuries the archetype of cultivated withdrawal from worldly politics. Koryusai's series reimagines these venerated male hermits as fashionable Edo women, a mitate substitution that allowed contemporary viewers to enjoy both the classical reference and the joke of seeing scholars rendered as the city's most current beauties. This second print in the set places two young women in a stand of bamboo, one perhaps holding a scroll or instrument while her companion looks on, the women's billowing kimono and elaborate coiffures standing in for the robes of the original sages. Koryusai builds the composition around the ribbed vertical lines of bamboo stalks, against which the soft curves of the figures register with particular clarity. The series prefigures the more thoroughly costume-driven Hinagata Wakana no Hatsu Moyo, his celebrated Yoshiwara fashion project that began in 1776 and made him one of the most important Edo bijin-ga designers of his generation. The Art Institute of Chicago holds this impression.