The scene represents two women in nōryō, the pastime of enjoying the evening cool after a hot summer day, as they sit under some lush foliage. One cools down with an uchiwa (non-folding fan), a common painting format at the time this image was created, but this particular fan is without decoration. Miyagawa Chōshun painted many hanging scrolls of beautifully dressed women. Trained in the style of Hishikawa Moronobu, Miyagawa is considered a pre-eminent ukiyo-e (floating world pictures) painter, whose delicately coloured and detailed works are essential to the lineage of ukiyo-e masters that followed him. Centred on the pleasures of city living, this depiction of a courtesan in fashions of the day became important iconography for the emerging genre.
Chōshun is considered a pre-eminent ukiyo-e painter, typically of hanging scrolls of single courtesans or handscrolls of seasonal scenes from the first half of the eighteenth century. He was born in Miyagawa village in Owari Province (now Aichi Prefecture) and went to train with the Kanō and Tosa schools in Edo (now Tokyo). However, he soon followed the styles of ukiyo-e artists Hishikawa Moronobu and Kaigetsudō Ando. He is described as a beautiful colourist and delicate painter. Early works show Moronobu’s strong thematic and stylistic influence, as Chōshun sometimes borrowed whole groups of figures with little or no modification from the elder’s originals. Chōshun became the progenitor of the Miyagawa-Katsumiyagawa-Katsukawa-Katsushika line that would form the mainstream of ukiyo-e painting until the end of the Edo period. His works are in the collections of Art Institute of Chicago, Freer Gallery of Art, Idemitsu Art Gallery, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Fine Arts Boson, Tokyo National Museum and Victoria & Albert Museum.


Emily Wakeling, former Assistant Curator, Asian and Pacific Art, October 2018.