Women Washing Clothes at Well

A signature Koryusai hashira-e from the Art Institute of Chicago, dated to about 1764 to 1775, this pillar print frames two women at a public well in the tall, narrow column for which Koryusai is most celebrated. The well, a fixed feature of every Edo neighborhood, was a place of female sociability where laundry, gossip, and small commerce converged. Koryusai stacks the figures vertically inside the impossibly tight format, using the trickling water and the laundry pole as compositional spines that lead the eye from bottom to top. The hashira-e format, pasted onto the wooden pillars of Edo townhouses, demanded designs that worked at extreme vertical proportions, and Koryusai's solutions to that constraint are universally regarded as the finest in the medium. The genre-scene subject, neither courtesan portrait nor classical parody but a slice of working-class women's daily life, reflects the more grounded, observational strain in his oeuvre and the breadth of bijin-ga subjects he was willing to take on.