Courtesan and Her Child Attendant Playing with a Cat

Suzuki Harunobu's 'Courtesan and Her Child Attendant Playing with a Cat,' dated to about 1763, brings together three of the most recurrent figures in Edo bijin-ga: the courtesan, her young kamuro (child attendant), and the domestic cat. The cat, a familiar inhabitant of pleasure-quarter rooms and of urban houses generally, recurs across the artist's work as a marker of intimacy and play, often softening the otherwise hierarchical relationship between the courtesan and her attendant. Harunobu draws all three figures with the slender, almost weightless proportions that mark his manner, and the composition places them in a balanced cluster that invites the eye to move between hands, fabric, and the animal at their center. The Art Institute of Chicago, the museum source for this record, dates the impression to about 1763, immediately before the full polychrome nishiki-e revolution of 1765 in which Suzuki Harunobu was a critical figure. The disciplined linework and restrained palette of the print are typical of his pre-nishiki-e work, while the compositional confidence anticipates the fully matured nishiki-e bijin-ga that would follow. For collectors of Suzuki Harunobu, prints of cats and pleasure-quarter interiors are among the most affectionate and durable images in his repertoire, demonstrating how thoroughly he made the domestic, feminine spaces of Edo into a legitimate and beloved subject for Japanese woodblock prints.