Young Woman Walking on a River Bank in Rain

Young Woman Walking on a River Bank in Rain, in the Art Institute of Chicago, is a hashira-e or pillar print, the tall narrow format - roughly seventy by twelve centimeters - originally intended to be pasted on the wooden pillars (hashira) of Edo townhouses. The vertical proportions force the designer to compress the figure into a long ribbon, and Shunman responds with one of his most graceful inventions: a slender young woman moving along a riverbank under driving rain, her umbrella tilted against the weather and her sash trailing behind her. The composition descends from the Torii Kiyonaga and Suzuki Harunobu traditions of pillar-print bijin-ga that Shunman absorbed under his teacher Kitao Shigemasa, but Shunman handles the format with a colder, more atmospheric sensibility than his contemporaries: the palette is restrained, the rain rendered with linear restraint rather than dramatic flourish, and the figure subordinated to the implied weather of the scene. Hashira-e were popular for domestic display because they fit the architectural module of the pillar, and their long, awkward proportions became a kind of test for ukiyo-e designers - those who could compose successfully in this format were considered serious draftsmen. Shunman's exercise here, executed in the late eighteenth or very early nineteenth century, comes from the period when he was still working in the commercial bijin-ga marketplace, before his pivot to private surimono commissions. It is preserved in the Art Institute of Chicago's collection of late-Edo single-sheet prints.