Ladies Drinking Tea

Ladies Drinking Tea is an undated color woodblock surimono in which Ryuryukyo Shinsai turns his still-life-trained eye toward the contemporary genre of bijin-ga. Two women are arranged around the small ritual of tea, and the composition exploits the surimono medium's affinity for refined surface detail: textile patterns are picked out in fine line and gentle color shifts; the tea utensils are given the precise material weight that distinguishes deluxe surimono from commercial nishiki-e. Like most surimono of its kind, the print would have carried one or more kyoka verses inscribed in the blank upper register, the poems likely riffing on the seasonal moment or social setting depicted below. Shinsai's bijin compositions sit between the elegant linearity of his Hokusai training and the decorative spatial sense he inherited from Tawaraya Sori. The Art Institute of Chicago holds the impression, part of the museum's extensive late-Edo surimono collection.