Women Walking by a Moat

Women Walking by a Moat is a Tenmei era Edo bijin-ga design by Katsukawa Shuncho, dated around 1780 in the Art Institute of Chicago's collection, depicting fashionable urban women strolling alongside one of the city's water features. Edo's moats and embankments, with their flanking willows and bridges, functioned as informal stages for the kind of urban leisure that ukiyo-e specialized in chronicling. Katsukawa Shuncho organizes his figures along the gentle horizontal of a stone embankment, allowing the women's tall, elongated forms to anchor the composition in a manner consistent with the Tenmei era's preference for stately bijin-ga arrangements. The Katsukawa school, in which Shuncho trained under Shunsho, had built its reputation on kabuki actor prints, yet by the start of the 1780s Shuncho had become a reliable producer of Edo bijin-ga that absorbed and refined the figural ideal championed by Torii Kiyonaga. In Women Walking by a Moat, the patterns of the women's kimono play against the textures of stone and water, while wig and hair ornaments register changes of fashion that customers attentively followed. Color is restrained, with quiet ground passages allowing the kimono patterns to read clearly. Even modest narrative content, the act of walking and conversing along a moat, supplies the print with a kind of urban poetry that bijin-ga viewers prized: not the dramatized intensity of kabuki yakusha-e, but a steady appreciation of style and place. Held in Chicago, the print is a useful example of how Katsukawa Shuncho situated Edo women within the city's everyday public spaces.