Beauty Looking Down at a Cat while Fixing a Mosquito Net

Beauty Looking Down at a Cat while Fixing a Mosquito Net is a quintessentially domestic Suzuki Harunobu print, in which the daily rituals of summer in Edo become the substance of bijin-ga. The composition shows a young woman in the act of suspending a mosquito net (kaya) from its corner hooks, her eye caught downward by a small cat that has wandered into the green gauze. Mosquito nets were a familiar feature of Japanese sleeping rooms in the warm months, and the moment Harunobu chooses captures the small interruption that pets often introduced into ordinary chores. The cat lifts its face toward the woman, while she pauses mid-task, the net falling in soft pleats. The technical demands of representing the translucent net required careful color registration and the use of pale tones that show through to the figure behind, a strength of Edo nishiki-e at its mature stage. As one of the artists responsible for that maturity, Suzuki Harunobu uses the scene to celebrate the small textures of household life - the patterned floor, the green of the net, the shadow of fur against textile. The image is also psychologically observant, treating the woman and the cat as participants in a shared pause rather than placing one at the service of the other. Source: Art Institute of Chicago, no. 36604.