Two Young Women Walking Under an Umbrella

Two Young Women Walking Under an Umbrella is a 1772 woodblock print by Isoda Koryusai that exemplifies the romantic intimacy at which the Edo bijin-ga tradition excelled. The print depicts two women sharing a single oilpaper umbrella, the bangasa, walking close together in what the convention of the subject implied was a sudden shower or evening dusk. Although the figures' faces are read by Edo viewers as both female, the genre of aigasa, literally meeting umbrella, was usually understood as a coded image of romantic attachment, the shared canopy of paper functioning as a private architecture in the public space of the street. The composition uses the wide arc of the umbrella as a unifying frame above the two figures, with their kimono hems flaring outward to complete a teardrop silhouette. Koryusai's draftsmanship handles the textile patterning of the two robes as complementary rather than identical, distinguishing the women's roles while emphasizing their physical closeness. He inherited the elongated figure type of Suzuki Harunobu but had begun by 1772 to make those figures more substantial and self-contained, foreshadowing the courtesan portraits of his celebrated Yoshiwara fashion series Hinagata Wakana no Hatsu Moyo later in the decade. The print also belongs to the older tradition of weather-themed bijin-ga, in which rain and wind let designers explore the play of fabric and the way bodies braced against the elements. The Art Institute of Chicago preserves this impression.