A Young Woman in a Summer Shower

A Young Woman in a Summer Shower, a 1765 chuban-format design by Suzuki Harunobu in the Art Institute of Chicago, belongs to the inaugural year of the polychrome nishiki-e technique that the artist is traditionally credited with helping to bring to maturity. The print shows a slender bijin caught by sudden summer rain, her umbrella tilted to deflect the slanting water as she hurries along a path or pauses beneath a wall. Rain in Edo ukiyo-e is one of the most expressive atmospheric devices available to a print designer: a series of diagonal lines can transform an ordinary street scene into a charged emotional moment. Harunobu deploys this device with characteristic restraint, allowing the line of rain to set the diagonal of the composition while the figure's body resists or yields to it. Her kimono is rendered with careful attention to pattern and color, the new polychrome resources of nishiki-e giving her textile a richness unavailable in earlier two- and three-color prints. Such weather-driven bijin-ga designs would become a staple of Edo ukiyo-e well into the nineteenth century, but Harunobu's version is among the earliest sophisticated treatments of the motif. The print exemplifies the new lyrical possibilities that nishiki-e opened to the chuban format in the hands of its most inventive practitioner.