Three Women near Rice Paddies

The right sheet of an oban diptych at the Art Institute of Chicago, this color woodblock print depicts three women in proximity to rice paddies, suggesting an outing into the agricultural areas at the city's edges or one of the rural districts adjacent to Edo. The motif of fashionable urban women set against rural fields was a recurring Tenmei conceit, juxtaposing the elaborately dressed cosmopolitan figure with the elemental seasonal labor of paddy cultivation. Shuncho's treatment integrates the women into the landscape rather than setting them apart from it, deploying his characteristic Edo bijin-ga vocabulary, tall figures, careful spacing, naturalistic kimono observation, against an agricultural backdrop. The diptych format, with its two oban sheets joining into a single horizontal composition, allowed for the panoramic spatial development that the Tenmei era used to give bijin-ga the same compositional scope previously reserved for landscape and battle scenes.