The Courtesan Sugawara of the Tsuruya and Her Attendant

The Courtesan Sugawara of the Tsuruya and Her Attendant, designed by Isoda Koryusai in 1771, names a celebrated oiran of the Tsuruya house in the Yoshiwara and pairs her with one of her young kamuro or shinzo attendants. The courtesan stands or strolls in a deliberate pose, her front-tied obi and heavy uchikake displayed at full effect, while the smaller attendant carries an accessory — a fan, a clog rack, a pipe-and-tobacco set — or simply walks at her side. By naming Sugawara and her house, Koryusai folds the print into the celebrity-portrait economy of the licensed quarter, in which named courtesans functioned as fashion icons and the cartouche of a print served as a kind of advertising tag. The composition is characteristic of the genre that Koryusai would crystallise within a few years in the Hinagata Wakana no Hatsumoyo series for the publisher Nishimuraya Yohachi, where each oiran of each major Yoshiwara house was given her own large fashion plate within a programme spanning the seasons. The Art Institute of Chicago impression (object 5157) is a chuban or oversized colour woodblock in characteristic Koryusai colour: warm reds and yellows in Sugawara's robes, indigo and rose in her under-layers, and clean keyblock outlines defining the silhouettes of both figures. As both a celebrity portrait and an Edo bijin-ga, the print exemplifies the way Koryusai was, by the early 1770s, formalising the relationship between named courtesan, attendant and fashionable display, laying the groundwork for the more codified hinagata cycle to come. Source: Art Institute of Chicago, https://www.artic.edu/artworks/5157.