Waiting for Her Lover

Isoda Koryusai produced "Waiting for Her Lover" around 1765, a chuban nishiki-e bijin-ga from the very first wave of full-color Edo ukiyo-e printing. The composition shows a single young woman in an unmistakably expectant posture, the half-turn of her shoulders and the slight forward lean of her head signaling that she is listening for a footstep at the gate. The motif of the woman waiting for a visitor was one of the most heavily worked subjects of Meiwa-era bijin-ga, an emotional shorthand that allowed designers to display dress, hairstyle and small interior details without the disruption of a second figure. Working as the principal Harunobu successor at this moment, Koryusai handles the subject in the slim, child-scaled figure type associated with Suzuki Harunobu, with the same restrained palette of olive, salmon and pale indigo, but already shows the slightly firmer contour that would soon distinguish his work. The Art Institute of Chicago impression preserves the careful registration and soft pigments of a clean early nishiki-e pull. The print is a representative example of Koryusai working at the height of the Harunobu idiom, before his shift in the early 1770s toward the larger oban bijin-ga and pillar prints (hashira-e) by which his mature output is now better known.