Group of Young Women on the Veranda of a Tea House

Group of Young Women on the Veranda of a Tea House is an Edo bijin-ga by Katsukawa Shuncho, in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Shuncho, a Katsukawa school designer of the late eighteenth century, was drawn to the social settings of Edo's urban leisure economy, and the veranda of a tea house was one of the most characteristic of those venues. Edo tea houses functioned as gathering places for casual conversation, light refreshment, and the watching of passers-by, and the veranda — half indoor, half outdoor — provided the print designer with an ideal stage on which to arrange a group of fashionably dressed women. Shuncho gathers his figures along the veranda in a loose horizontal arrangement, each woman caught in a slightly different posture so that the group reads as a moment of unhurried sociability rather than as a posed sequence. Their robes are patterned with the seasonal motifs the Katsukawa school handled with such care, and the wooden architecture of the tea house — railings, posts, and beams — provides a quietly geometric counterpoint to the curving lines of the figures. Shuncho's elongated proportions and gently curving outlines exemplify the slender bijin-ga ideal he helped establish in the 1780s and 1790s. Prints of this kind functioned both as fashion records and as documents of a particular form of urban pleasure, in which the act of being seen on a tea-house veranda was itself part of the leisure on offer. The Metropolitan Museum of Art preserves this impression among its Japanese woodblock print holdings.