Young Man Admiring a Girl through a Barred Window

Isoda Koryusai's "Young Man Admiring a Girl through a Barred Window" is a chuban nishiki-e of about 1765, made at the moment when full-color woodblock printing was first being introduced to the commercial market of Edo ukiyo-e. The composition shows a stock urban encounter, a young man pausing beside a window of vertical wooden bars to look in at a young woman, a scene that could equally be set against an ordinary merchant residence or against the latticed front of a Yoshiwara teahouse. Working as a Harunobu successor in the wake of his teacher's small-format innovations, Koryusai treats the subject in the lyrical, slightly stylised idiom of Meiwa-era bijin-ga, with the slim Harunobu figure type, restrained palette of olive, salmon and indigo, and the lightly comic narrative pivot that defines the genre. The bars of the window provide a strong vertical armature against which the two figures are arranged in opposing diagonals, a structural device Koryusai would later refine in his pillar prints (hashira-e). The Art Institute of Chicago impression preserves the soft pigments and clean key-block lines of a good early nishiki-e pull. The print stands as a record of Koryusai working in the Harunobu manner just before he began to develop the larger oban bijin-ga, the long-running Yoshiwara fashion plate series and the hashira-e pillar prints by which he is now principally remembered.