Young Man on Horseback and Two Women Watching from a Window

Around 1765 Isoda Koryusai produced this chuban nishiki-e of a young man riding past while two women watch him from an upper window. The print belongs to the first wave of full-color Edo ukiyo-e prints made after the 1765 nishiki-e revolution and is among the early designs in which Koryusai, working as a Harunobu successor, used a narrow architectural frame, here the window, to focus and concentrate a domestic narrative. The encounter is one of the stock pivots of Meiwa-era bijin-ga, in which a passing figure on the street draws the attention of the interior occupants, but Koryusai handles the moment with the quiet restraint that distinguishes his version of the Harunobu idiom. The figures are slim and child-scaled, the horse rendered in a few firm contours, and the entire composition is held together by the rectangle of the window opening, a compositional decision that anticipates the strict vertical discipline of Koryusai's later hashira-e pillar prints. The Art Institute of Chicago impression preserves the soft early-nishiki palette of olive, salmon and pale indigo, with the careful registration that Edo collectors associated with the new luxury technique. Within Koryusai's career the print sits alongside a number of mid-1760s bijin-ga designs in which he was already experimenting with frame-within-frame compositions, a strategy that would distinguish his mature oban output of the 1770s.