Young Woman Drops her Geta as She Boards a Boat

Young Woman Drops her Geta as She Boards a Boat, designed by Isoda Koryusai in 1768, captures the exact instant in which a riverside excursion turns into comic mishap. A fashionable young woman has stepped from the bank toward a small pleasure boat when one of her lacquered geta slips from her foot and tumbles toward the water; her companion in the boat reaches up in startled response, while a boatman with a pole steadies the craft. Koryusai had recently begun working in the new full-colour nishiki-e mode pioneered by Suzuki Harunobu, and the print uses softly graded blues and greens for the river, indigo bokashi for the sky, and small touches of vermilion in the linings of the women's robes. The composition contributes to the genre of Edo bijin-ga that Koryusai would extend across the 1770s, most famously in the Hinagata Wakana no Hatsumoyo series of courtesan fashion plates produced with publisher Nishimuraya Yohachi. Here, however, the subject is the unranked townswoman of Edo at leisure rather than the licensed quarter, and the artist treats the everyday accident with affectionate humour: the lost geta, suspended mid-fall, gives the picture its narrative pivot, while the women's elongated bodies and small heads sit within Harunobu's mid-1760s aesthetic. The Art Institute of Chicago impression (object 60528) preserves the print's clean keyblock outlines and the delicate yellow ochre of the boat's hull. The image is a fine example of Koryusai's early facility for staging small, telling incidents drawn from Edo riverside life. Source: Art Institute of Chicago, https://www.artic.edu/artworks/60528.