White Rabbit and Amaranth

"White Rabbit and Amaranth" is an Isoda Koryusai kacho-ga of about 1766, an early excursion into the bird-and-flower (and small-animal) subject matter that would later occupy a large share of his mature pillar-print output. The print pairs a white rabbit with the slender flowering stems of amaranth, an autumn plant whose dense red plumes give the composition its strongest colour accent. Koryusai's handling of the subject reflects his position as the principal Harunobu successor at a moment when full-color nishiki-e had only just been introduced into the Edo ukiyo-e market. The image is built on a quiet, almost diagrammatic logic, with the rabbit set low against a curving stand of amaranth, the negative space above the animal carrying as much visual weight as the figure itself. That economy of design is one reason later print historians have ranked Koryusai's natural-history pieces alongside his bijin-ga and hashira-e (pillar prints) as one of the three main strands of his output. The Art Institute of Chicago impression preserves a careful registration of the soft greys, ochres and reds favored by early nishiki-e publishers. Within the broader sweep of Edo ukiyo-e, the print is a small but characteristic record of the moment in the mid-1760s when designers began to use the new multi-block colour technique for subjects other than bijin-ga and yakusha-e, opening the field to the natural-history images that became a Koryusai specialty.