Young Woman Hanging a Painting

Isoda Koryusai's "Young Woman Hanging a Painting," a chuban nishiki-e of about 1766, places a single fashionably dressed woman in the act of suspending a kakemono hanging scroll on the wall of an interior. The subject is one of the small domestic motifs that Meiwa-era Edo ukiyo-e bijin-ga used to display dress, hairstyle and the carefully composed clutter of a wealthy townhouse, but it also functions as a reflexive image of taste, an Edo woman handling exactly the kind of object that the print itself imitates in miniature. Working as a Harunobu successor in the immediate aftermath of the 1765 nishiki-e revolution, Koryusai stages the action in the slim, child-scaled figure type of Suzuki Harunobu, with the same restrained palette of olive, salmon and pale indigo and the same quiet mood. The figure's raised arms and outstretched scroll establish a strong vertical accent within the chuban rectangle, an early instance of the kind of axial compositional thinking that Koryusai would later refine in his hashira-e pillar prints. The Art Institute of Chicago impression preserves the careful registration and clean key-block linework of a good early-nishiki pull. The print is a representative example of Koryusai's Meiwa-era bijin-ga, a body of work that established him as the principal continuation of the Harunobu tradition and prepared the ground for his more ambitious bijin-ga and pattern-book projects of the next decade.