Bush Clover (Hagi), from an untitled series of Flowers

Suzuki Harunobu's 'Bush Clover (Hagi),' from an untitled series of Flowers, dates to about 1764 and demonstrates how the artist integrated botanical imagery into his project of contemporary bijin-ga. Bush clover, with its small autumnal flowers, is one of the seven traditional autumn grasses of Japanese poetry, recurring in waka and Noh as a marker of seasonal melancholy and feminine refinement. Harunobu's print pairs the plant with a contemporary figure, allowing the resonances of the classical canon, autumn, longing, the passage of beauty, to flow through the contemporary bijin without ever being explicitly named. The Art Institute of Chicago, the museum source for this record, dates the impression to about 1764, on the immediate threshold of the full polychrome nishiki-e revolution of 1765 in which Suzuki Harunobu played such a critical role. The print's restrained palette and disciplined linework typify his pre-nishiki-e manner. For collectors of Suzuki Harunobu, flower-themed series are an important category because they show how thoroughly he had absorbed the logic of waka anthology and classical illustration, in which each plant carried a fixed cluster of associations, into the contemporary urban world of Edo bijin-ga. 'Bush Clover' is a fine example of the way the artist could compress an entire literary tradition into the gesture of a single figure beside a single plant.