"Ka": A Court Lady Thinks Disconsolately of Her Lover, from the series "Tales of Ise in Fashionable Brocade Pictures (Furyu nishiki-e Ise monogatari)"

Designated Ka in the syllabic ordering of Katsukawa Shunsho's series Tales of Ise in Fashionable Brocade Pictures (Furyu nishiki-e Ise monogatari), this plate shows a court lady brooding over her absent lover, an episode adapted from the tenth-century Ise monogatari. Held in the Art Institute of Chicago, the series belongs to the late 1760s, the period in which the new polychrome brocade printing technology of nishiki-e was being explored to its full capacity. Shunsho updates the Heian setting with the dress and interior furnishings of contemporary Edo, the furyu or stylish recasting that mid-eighteenth-century ukiyo-e designers used to bring classical literature into the visual vocabulary of their own moment. The court lady reclines in a posture of melancholy reflection, the disposition of her robes and the angle of her head carrying the emotional content of the scene without requiring further illustration of the absent figure she contemplates. While Katsukawa school fame rested principally on yakusha-e, Shunsho's classical literary series shows the breadth of his Edo ukiyo-e practice and his fluency with the visual register of refined feminine subjects. The Furyu nishiki-e Ise monogatari rewards study as a coherent suite that mediates between courtly classical narrative and the contemporary urban culture of Edo, and the Art Institute of Chicago holds an exceptional run of its plates.