Young Woman Feeding a Rat

"Young Woman Feeding a Rat," a chuban nishiki-e by Isoda Koryusai of about 1766, depicts a young woman in an interior setting offering food to a small rodent, an unusual narrative pivot for Meiwa-era Edo ukiyo-e bijin-ga and one that draws on the broader stock of small-animal motifs that designers of the period were beginning to incorporate into figure prints. The composition isolates the woman against a sparely indicated interior, with the rat positioned low at her feet and the gesture of feeding occupying the central axis of the design. Working as the principal Harunobu successor in the early years of full-color nishiki-e, Koryusai treats the figure in the slim, child-scaled idiom of Suzuki Harunobu, with the same restrained palette of olive, salmon and pale indigo. The print is a small but characteristic example of the way Meiwa-period bijin-ga designers used incidental domestic animals, dogs, cats, rats, songbirds, to give a single-figure interior its narrative anchor, a strategy that would be developed at much greater length by later generations of Edo printmakers. The Art Institute of Chicago impression preserves the careful registration and clean key-block linework of a good early-nishiki pull. Within Koryusai's career it sits among a substantial group of chuban bijin-ga of the late 1760s that prefigure the more ambitious oban courtesan portraits of the next decade.