Walking Courtesan, Possibly Sugawara of the Tsuruya House of Pleasure

Katsukawa Shunsho's standing portrait shows a Yoshiwara courtesan, possibly Sugawara of the Tsuruya house, in mid-stride along an unseen street of the licensed quarter. The figure occupies the full height of the hosoban sheet, the heavy outer kimono falling in long parallel folds and the sash tied in front to mark her rank as a high-ranking professional rather than a townswoman. Shunsho is better known as the reformer of Edo ukiyo-e yakusha-e and the leader of the Katsukawa school, but his bijin-ga of this date show how readily the same drawing discipline transferred to portraits of women. The face is small and finely drawn, with the characteristic narrow nose and slightly downturned mouth of his bijin type; the body underneath the robes is implied through the shifting fall of the cloth rather than drawn directly. Color is restrained, with a couple of blocks of indigo, ocher, and muted red playing against the white-prepared ground. The Art Institute of Chicago preserves this impression. Walking-courtesan portraits had a long pedigree in Edo ukiyo-e, going back to Sukenobu and Masanobu in the early eighteenth century; what Shunsho contributes is the same particularizing eye for likeness that defined his yakusha-e, applied here to a named woman of the Yoshiwara rather than an anonymous beauty type. The print is therefore both an aesthetic object and a small piece of social geography.