Discovering the Address of a Husband's Lover, from the series "A Collection of Humorous Poems (Haifu yanagidaru)"

Discovering the Address of a Husband's Lover, from the series A Collection of Humorous Poems (Haifu yanagidaru), dated 1785 in the Art Institute of Chicago, is a Torii Kiyonaga print built around the senryu tradition. Haifu yanagidaru, first compiled in 1765 and continued through many volumes, gathered satirical seventeen-syllable verses on the foibles of Edo townspeople; the title of this sheet refers to a particular senryu in which a wife or maid uncovers her husband's mistress by tracing the address scribbled on a stray letter. Kiyonaga gives the comic scenario the same dignified visual treatment he reserves for his more solemn bijin-ga: the women involved are tall, beautifully dressed and posed without exaggerated emotion, leaving the joke to be read from the recovered letter and from a faint complicity between the figures. The Torii school's clean linearity and Kiyonaga's mature Edo bijin-ga proportions thus combine to elevate a piece of street satire into something close to genre painting. The print also illustrates how the literary culture of Edo—senryu, haikai, joruri—interlocked with print production, with publishers willing to commission whole series around a popular verse collection. The Art Institute of Chicago holds the design among its Kiyonaga prints. For collectors, the sheet is an interesting hybrid: a bijin-ga that doubles as poetry illustration, anchoring Kiyonaga's tall, calm figures in the wit and gossip of late eighteenth-century Edo households.