Preparing Fish

A hashira-e (pillar print) color woodblock print at the Art Institute of Chicago, this work depicts a woman preparing fish in her kitchen. The hashira-e format, designed to be pasted onto the slim wooden posts of Edo interiors, demanded extreme vertical compression, often rendering figures cropped at the head, the legs, or both, with the action concentrated in a narrow column of paper barely wider than a hand. Shuncho was one of the most accomplished masters of the hashira-e in his generation, and his pillar prints depicting women in domestic activity, dressing, playing games, preparing food, are considered among the highest achievements of the format. Preparing Fish is characteristic of how Shuncho used the genre to insert a quietly observed moment of daily female labor into the same Tenmei-era figural mode he applied to courtesans and fashionable promenaders, demonstrating that his bijin-ga sensibility extended beyond the Yoshiwara into the registers of ordinary household life.