Battledore and shuttlecock

Listed by the Art Institute of Chicago as a color woodblock print in oban format and benizuri-e classification dated to around 1748, this image of battledore and shuttlecock depicts the New Year game of hanetsuki, in which young women bat a feathered shuttlecock back and forth across a court using flat wooden paddles called hagoita. The game, traditionally played by women and girls during the first days of the new year, became one of the great recurring subjects of ukiyo-e because of its seasonal specificity, its association with female sociability, and its graphic potential, with the airborne shuttlecock supplying a visual interrupter that organized the composition. Ishikawa Toyonobu's treatment in the oban benizuri-e format places the players within the rectangular sheet in a balanced two-figure arrangement that allowed him to develop both their kimono textiles and the dynamic geometry of the game. Benizuri-e classification confirms the use of two or three printed blocks supplying rose pink and grass green over the black-line printing, the new color-printing technique that Toyonobu was among the first to embrace. The Art Institute print is an essential document of mid-Edo seasonal genre imagery and of Toyonobu's early benizuri-e production.