Uncho, the Wife of the Official Mei Ch'ing, Reading at a Table

Uncho, the Wife of the Official Mei Ch'ing, Reading at a Table by Isoda Koryusai belongs to a category of ukiyo-e in which famous Chinese women of antiquity are reimagined for an Edo audience. The Cleveland Museum of Art preserves the impression that documents this design, dating it to 1773, in the years when Koryusai was developing the most ambitious of his parodic and historical compositions. Uncho, a virtuous Chinese consort celebrated in didactic literature for her learning and her loyalty to her husband, is shown here seated at a Chinese-style table absorbed in a book; Koryusai costumes her in robes that read simultaneously as continental and contemporary, allowing his Japanese viewers to recognize the historical subject while enjoying the surface pleasures of an Edo bijin-ga. Such prints depended on the educated audience's familiarity with the catalogues of virtuous Chinese women that circulated widely in eighteenth-century Japan, and they offered designers a polite way to incorporate erudition into the commercial market. The work belongs to the same broader phase of Koryusai's career that produced the celebrated series Hinagata Wakana Hatsu Moyo, and the same precision he brought to courtesan fashion is here turned to the imagined dress of a Chinese matron. For collectors, the print documents the range of literary reference Koryusai expected of his viewers.