Two Women on a Balcony

A late-eighteenth-century color woodblock print held by the Art Institute of Chicago, this work shows two fashionable Edo women gathered on an elevated wooden balcony. Shuncho here works in the intimate two-figure compositional mode that he and Kiyonaga both developed during the Tenmei era, where the relationship between the women, expressed through inclined heads, the directional arc of glances, and the overlap of kimono sleeves, carries the full content of the image. The balcony setting, typical of upper-floor rooms in pleasure-quarter teahouses and merchant residences, places the figures slightly above the viewer's plane and frames them against the sky, allowing the textile patterns and seasonal motifs of their dress to read clearly. The print is one of the works that has historically been attributed to Torii Kiyonaga but is now recognized as Shuncho's, a reattribution made possible by the careful comparative work undertaken in collections like Chicago's.