Climbing the steps one hundred times

Suzuki Harunobu's "Climbing the steps one hundred times," dated about 1760 in the Art Institute of Chicago's records, depicts the popular Edo devotional practice of hyakudo mairi, in which a worshipper paced repeatedly between a marker post and the worship hall of a shrine, performing the round one hundred times to reinforce a prayer. The subject appealed strongly to Edo ukiyo-e artists because it allowed them to show a slender young woman alone at night, her sleeves and skirt pulled into motion, against the spare architecture of a shrine precinct. Harunobu treats the scene with his characteristic chuban bijin-ga sensibility: the figure is elongated and weightless, her face small and demure, her devotion stylized into a graceful diagonal across the sheet. As a principal architect of nishiki-e, the full-color "brocade print" technique that took hold in Edo around 1765, Suzuki Harunobu used multiple precisely registered blocks to lay down the soft palette of pinks, jades, and grays that lend the night scene its sense of hushed quiet. The chuban format keeps the encounter intimate and contemplative. The Art Institute of Chicago preserves the impression among its Harunobu holdings, where the print serves as a window onto Edo religious practice as it was filtered through the floating-world idiom of nishiki-e.