Courteousness (Rei), from the series "Five Cardinal Virtues"

Courteousness (Rei), from the series Five Cardinal Virtues, is a Suzuki Harunobu print of about 1767 in the Art Institute of Chicago (artwork 89027). It is the companion to his image of Benevolence in the same set, which assigns each of the Confucian goyu - benevolence, righteousness, propriety, wisdom, trust - to a contemporary Edo scene. Rei, here translated as "Courteousness," denotes the broader Confucian virtue of ritual propriety: the proper conduct of relations between people through bows, greetings, ceremonial gifts, and respectful service. Harunobu dramatizes the virtue through an Edo interior in which one or more figures perform a moment of polite social ritual, perhaps the offering of tea, the presentation of a letter, or a formal greeting between hosts and guests. The treatment uses the polychrome resources of nishiki-e to detail the layered robes, the small ceremonial objects, and the architectural framework of the encounter. As elsewhere in his Edo bijin-ga, the slender figures with their elongated proportions and softly drawn features carry the conceptual freight of the print without becoming stiffly didactic; the everyday scene reads at one level as a piece of moral instruction and at another as a self-contained image of the floating world. The Art Institute of Chicago's online record at artic.edu under artwork 89027 catalogues the print as Courteousness (Rei), from the series Five Cardinal Virtues by Suzuki Harunobu, within the museum's extensive holdings of his polychrome prints.