Returning Sails at Ryogoku River (Ryogoku no kihan), from the series "Eight Parodies by Contemporary Beauties (Tosei mitate bijin hakkei)"

Returning Sails at Ryogoku River (Ryogoku no kihan), from the series Eight Parodies by Contemporary Beauties (Tosei mitate bijin hakkei), is a late-eighteenth-century oban color woodblock print at the Art Institute of Chicago. The series uses contemporary Edo beauties to parody the canonical Eight Views: "returning sails" - one of the standard topics in the Eight Views of Xiao and Xiang tradition - is here transferred to Ryogoku, the famous bridge over the Sumida River that was the heart of Edo's summer entertainment district. The mitate device pictures fashionable women in current Edo dress whose gestures or accessories evoke the underlying landscape subject, the implication being that the beauties themselves are the floating-world replacement for the classical scene. The oban format, larger and more visually generous than the earlier hosoban and chuban sheets, became standard for bijin-ga by the 1770s. Shigemasa's beauties in this print show the dignified, taller proportions that would prove so influential on Kiyonaga and the next generation. The Art Institute of Chicago's impression is among the important records of Shigemasa's mature bijin-ga style at the moment when it was reshaping the genre.