Courtesan Reading a Letterc. 1745
Ishikawa Toyonobu designed this in about 1745, aged about 29. It is now at the Art Institute of Chicago. More about this work
About this work
A work made of hand-colored woodblock print; toku-oban, urushi-e.
Description from the Art Institute of Chicago.
Ishikawa Toyonobu designed this in about 1745, aged about 29. It is now at the Art Institute of Chicago.
How it was made
- Colour woodblock print
- In Japan these were a team effort. The artist drew the design, a carver cut it into cherry-wood blocks, one block for each colour, and a printer brushed on the pigment and rubbed each sheet by hand. Full-colour prints of this kind were called nishiki-e, “brocade pictures”, from the 1760s on.
- Hand-coloured
- Printed in black, then coloured by hand in watercolour, one sheet at a time.
Ukiyo-e
Japanese woodblock prints of the floating world: actors, courtesans, landscapes and the sea.
Rights and the museum’s record
Public domain. The Art Institute of Chicago has dedicated this image to the public domain under CC0, so anyone may copy, adapt and use it, for any purpose, without asking. Our prints and files are reproductions made from the museum’s image; the museum doesn’t endorse them.
- Object number
- 1931.244
- Credit
- Courtesy of the Art Institute of Chicago
- Type
- Department
- Arts of Asia
- Licence
- CC0 1.0 Universal
- Museum record
- See it on the museum’s site
