Taking Leave

Isoda Koryusai produced "Taking Leave" around 1765, in the first burst of full-color Edo ukiyo-e printing that followed the 1765 introduction of nishiki-e. The chuban-format design shows a couple at the moment of parting, a recurring narrative pivot in Meiwa-era bijin-ga that allowed designers to set off the elaborate dress and quiet emotion of two figures against a minimal interior. Working as a Harunobu successor, Koryusai handles the subject in the slender, almost child-scaled figure type that Suzuki Harunobu had popularized only a year or two earlier, with the same restrained palette of olive, salmon and indigo and the same lyrical handling of facial expression. The lightly suggested architectural setting, perhaps the genkan or veranda of a Yoshiwara house or merchant residence, frames the figures without competing with them, and the design's quiet psychological reserve marks it out from the more emphatic, theatrical mood of Katsukawa school portraiture being produced in the same years. The Art Institute of Chicago impression preserves the soft pigments and tight registration of a clean early nishiki-e pull, before the colors have shifted with time. Prints of this kind formed the working currency of Edo ukiyo-e in the second half of the 1760s, and "Taking Leave" is a representative example of Koryusai's work in the Harunobu idiom prior to his shift, in the early 1770s, toward the larger oban bijin-ga and pillar-print designs by which he is now better known.