A Flower Vendor

Dated 1737-38 and held in the Art Institute of Chicago, A Flower Vendor is a hand-coloured hosoban urushi-e print by Nishimura Shigenobu that depicts an itinerant flower seller in the kind of single-figure street-genre composition that anchored a substantial share of the mid-1730s ukiyo-e market. The street-vendor subject, whether of flowers, fans, sweets, or seasonal foods, was a perennial of early-eighteenth-century Edo woodblock printing, drawing on the urban audience's familiarity with the daily street life of the shogunal capital. Shigenobu's hosoban composition arranges the flower vendor's slender vertical figure within the narrow pillar format with characteristic Nishimura-school refinement, the figure's gestural lean and the careful disposition of the seasonal flower stems demonstrating the artist's command of the single-figure idiom that the format invited. The hand-coloured urushi-e finish, with its glossy black areas and the hand-applied palette of beni pink and other mineral pigments, represents the highest refinement of the pre-benizuri-e colour vocabulary, in the years just before two-block colour printing would transform the technical possibilities of the medium. This print is closely related to Shigenobu's larger triptych Peddler of Flowers of the Four Seasons (Shiki no hanauri sanpukutsui), also in the Art Institute of Chicago, in which the flower-vendor subject is developed across three coordinated sheets, and the present hosoban single sheet may represent an alternative or related composition within the same iconographic series. The Art Institute of Chicago example documents Shigenobu's mature compositional command and his engagement with the genre street scenes that would become a foundational current of mid-century ukiyo-e.