Beauty by a Bed of Chrysanthemums

Beauty by a Bed of Chrysanthemums, a Suzuki Harunobu print available through ukiyo-e.org from the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, captures the artist's gift for tying a single figure to a single seasonal motif. A young woman stands beside a low bed of chrysanthemums, the autumn flower long associated in East Asian visual culture with longevity, elegance, and the imperial chrysanthemum festival. Harunobu uses the motif to anchor the figure firmly in season and sentiment: her robes, her hair ornaments, and the controlled palette of the print all participate in the autumnal mood, while the soft outline blocks and gently graded color flats are characteristic of his contribution to the new polychrome medium of nishiki-e. The composition exemplifies the strain of Edo bijin-ga in which beauty is inseparable from horticulture. By placing the woman next to a tended bed of cultivated flowers rather than wild blossoms, Harunobu suggests an urban garden of the kind kept by wealthy townspeople and brothel owners, and turns the figure into one more cultivated object in a setting of carefully ordered nature. The print belongs to the larger body of his designs that pair Edo women with the seasons and that helped establish bijin-ga as a vehicle for the same kind of seasonal sensibility that classical waka and haikai had long expressed. The image is recorded through ukiyo-e.org at ukiyo-e.org/image/aggv/dscn1371 as Beauty by a Bed of Chrysanthemums by Suzuki Harunobu in the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria.