Young Couple with Infant Son on a Moonlit Night

Isoda Koryusai produced this chuban nishiki-e of a young couple with their infant son on a moonlit night around 1765, in the immediate aftermath of the technical revolution that introduced full-color woodblock printing to Edo. The print belongs to the gentle, narrative-rich bijin-ga of the early Meiwa years, when Suzuki Harunobu's small-format domestic vignettes set the dominant tone for Edo ukiyo-e and his closest followers, Koryusai chief among them, populated their compositions with the same lyrical figure type. Koryusai stages the encounter as a tightly framed nocturne, the moon implied by a pale field rather than emphatically inscribed, with the father, mother and small child arranged in a quiet domestic triangle that aligns the print with the period's interest in showing samurai and merchant family life as a counterpart to the more public theatre of the Yoshiwara. As a Harunobu successor working at chuban scale, Koryusai retains Harunobu's slender proportions and restrained palette of olive, salmon, and indigo while introducing the firmer, more illustrational contour that would soon distinguish his mature designs. The Art Institute of Chicago impression preserves the delicate, lightly faded surface typical of these early luxury prints, which were issued in relatively small editions on heavy hosho paper. Within Koryusai's overall output the print sits among the relatively quiet, non-erotic, domestic genre subjects that complement his better-known Yoshiwara fashion plates.