Beauty and Morning Glories

Beauty and Morning Glories by Suzuki Harunobu (museum date 1725, a cataloguing artifact) pairs an elegant young woman with the climbing flowers that became one of Edo's most beloved summer subjects. Morning glories (asagao) bloomed at dawn and shriveled by midday, an evanescence that made them a favorite emblem of fleeting beauty in poetry and visual art. Harunobu places the figure beside a trellis or bamboo support along which the vines have twined, allowing the flat planes of cool blue blossoms to set off the warmer tones of her robes. The composition typifies Edo bijin-ga at its most lyrical: a single figure, a single seasonal object, no overt narrative, all relations made through gesture and the soft inflections of color. As a key designer in the maturing nishiki-e workshop system of the 1760s, Suzuki Harunobu used such small subjects to demonstrate what registered multi-block printing could do. The morning glories required clean color separations to read as different blooms, while the woman's robes required overprinting to suggest pattern. The result is a sheet that rewards close looking without demanding literary scholarship from its viewer, a balance that helped make Harunobu's bijin-ga commercially successful as well as artistically influential. The print also reflects Edo culture's seasonal attentiveness, in which household activities, clothing choices, and visual entertainment all responded to the calendar. Source: Art Institute of Chicago, no. 109392.