Tamashima River in Hizen Province (Tamashimagawa, Hizen), from the series "Fashionable Mirrors of Famous Places (Furyu meisho kagami)"

This chuban-format bijin-ga by Isoda Koryusai, dated about 1765, comes from the series "Furyu meisho kagami" (Fashionable Mirrors of Famous Places). In the meisho mitate-e tradition of Edo ukiyo-e, the artist takes a classically inscribed place name, here the Tamashima River in Hizen province in the far west of Kyushu, and replaces the expected landscape with a scene of fashionable urban women. The literary place becomes a mirror in which the modish Edo present is reflected back, a strategy with deep roots in classical waka poetry and in earlier popular prints. Working as a Harunobu successor in the immediate aftermath of the 1765 nishiki-e revolution, Koryusai treats the figures in the slim, lyrical idiom of Suzuki Harunobu, with the same restrained palette of olive, salmon and indigo and the same quiet domestic mood. The Tamashima River is named in the cartouche but is felt only through small attributes, a stream, a willow, a moored boat, that punctuate an otherwise interior-scaled composition. The Art Institute of Chicago impression preserves the clean key-block linework and soft early-nishiki pigments that mark the first generation of multi-block color printing. Within Koryusai's career the series is significant as one of his earliest extended mitate cycles, prefiguring the literary and series-based structures he would later use to anchor much larger projects such as the Yoshiwara pattern book "Hinagata wakana no hatsu moyo."