Two Young Women with Umbrella Caught in Rainstorm

"Two Young Women with Umbrella Caught in Rainstorm" is a chuban nishiki-e by Isoda Koryusai of about 1766, made during the early Meiwa period when the recently introduced full-color woodblock technique was still being treated as a luxury novelty in Edo ukiyo-e publishing. The composition shows two young women sheltering together under a single shared umbrella as rain falls in dense diagonal lines across the sheet, a motif that became one of the most enduring narrative pivots of Edo bijin-ga and that would later resurface, with elaborations, in the work of Suzuki Harunobu's other followers and of the Utagawa school. Koryusai, working as the principal Harunobu successor, handles the figures in the slim, child-scaled idiom of his teacher, with the same restrained palette of olive, salmon and indigo, but the diagonal rain lines and the firm contour of the figures already signal his more sober, illustrational sensibility. The Art Institute of Chicago impression preserves the careful registration and the soft early-nishiki pigments that period collectors associated with the new technique. The shared umbrella as a sign of close female friendship or, in other readings, of sisterly travelling companions, is a recurring theme in Edo ukiyo-e bijin-ga, and Koryusai's version is a quietly characteristic Meiwa-era example, made before his shift in the early 1770s to the larger oban formats and hashira-e pillar prints that define his mature work.