Courtesan Riding an Ox

Courtesan Riding an Ox, dating from around 1761 and preserved in the Art Institute of Chicago, is among Suzuki Harunobu's playful mitate-e, in which a classical or religious subject is restaged with a fashionable Edo woman. The likely source is one of the well-known representations of the Daoist sage Laozi (Roshi) riding out of China on the back of an ox, a subject familiar to educated Edo audiences from Chinese ink paintings and from Kano school adaptations of the same theme. Harunobu replaces the bearded patriarch with a slender courtesan, her hair piled in elaborate combs and her kimono falling in heavy folds across the ox's broad back. The gentle absurdity of the substitution is precisely the point: viewers were expected to recognize the high-cultural model, register the inversion of age, gender, and social status, and savor the result. Visually the print is restrained, with the bulk of the ox anchoring the composition while the courtesan provides the calligraphic line. As a pioneer of Edo bijin-ga and of the full-color nishiki-e technique, Suzuki Harunobu used mitate to argue, in effect, that the courtesans of Yoshiwara deserved to be treated with the same iconographic seriousness as Chinese sages. The result is a print that operates simultaneously as fashion plate, literary joke, and meditation on cultural authority, all condensed into a single, deceptively simple image of a young woman and an ox.