Benevolence (Jin), from the series "Five Cardinal Virtues"

Benevolence (Jin), from the series Five Cardinal Virtues, is a Suzuki Harunobu print of about 1767 in the Art Institute of Chicago (artwork 89023). The series adapts the Confucian goyu, the five cardinal virtues of benevolence (jin), righteousness, propriety, wisdom, and trust, and assigns each a contemporary Edo scene in which the abstract quality is dramatized through everyday or floating-world action. The pictorial strategy belongs to the genre of mitate-e, in which classical or doctrinal concepts are transposed into the urban present for the pleasure of an audience trained to recognize both layers. In Benevolence, Harunobu typically organizes the design around an interaction between figures - often a senior person showing kindness to a child or junior - so that the social ethic is grounded in a single, legible vignette. The polychrome nishiki-e printing allows the layered robes, accessories, and architectural details to be rendered with the careful color registration that distinguished his workshop, and the slender, idealized bodies of the participants are characteristic of his contribution to Edo bijin-ga. By embedding Confucian values in the everyday life of Edo, the print also fits the broader pedagogical strain of mid-eighteenth-century ukiyo-e, in which moral and literary content was made accessible through familiar visual idioms. The Art Institute of Chicago's online record at artic.edu under artwork 89023 catalogues the print as Benevolence (Jin), from the series Five Cardinal Virtues by Suzuki Harunobu.