Young Woman with Pet Monkey

An Art Institute of Chicago hashira-e (pillar print) dated to about 1770, Young Woman with Pet Monkey depicts a fashionable young Edo woman accompanied by a small pet monkey at the end of a leash. The pet monkey was a coveted exotic in eighteenth-century Edo, associated with traveling performers, sarumawashi animal trainers, and the more affluent merchant households that could afford an imported pet. Koryusai uses the monkey as a compositional anchor in the lower register of the tall, narrow hashira-e, the leash drawing the eye downward from the standing figure of the woman to the small animal at her feet. The pillar print format, in which Koryusai is universally regarded as the supreme master, demanded designs that worked at extreme vertical proportions, and the solution here, a single figure with a small subordinate motif at the base, is one of his most elegant. The slim, willowy bijin and pastel registration are characteristic of his early mature manner.