Daruma looking at his reflection

Daruma Looking at His Reflection, dated 1762 and held in the Art Institute of Chicago, is one of Suzuki Harunobu's playful religious subjects in which the founder of Chan and Zen Buddhism appears as the object of affectionate parody. Bodhidharma, known in Japan as Daruma, was traditionally depicted as a fierce bearded patriarch in flowing red robes, famous for having sat in meditation for nine years until his legs withered away. Harunobu reimagines him bending over a still surface to gaze at his own reflection, a gesture that transforms the austere founder into a self-aware figure within the visual culture of the floating world. The print belongs to the mitate tradition, in which a familiar religious or literary subject is recast for contemporary play, and it depends on viewers' deep familiarity with conventional Daruma iconography to register its gentle humor. Produced at the threshold of the full nishiki-e revolution, the sheet shows Harunobu experimenting with color block registration to set Daruma's vivid red against muted background tones. The composition's tight focus on the patriarch and his doubled image becomes a meditation on perception and recognition, themes that resonate with the very Zen tradition the figure represents. While the print does not display the slender female beauties typical of Harunobu's Edo bijin-ga, it shares with that body of work the artist's interest in quiet introspective gesture and the lyrical use of negative space. The Art Institute of Chicago's catalogue entry situates this impression among Harunobu's early experiments with religious and literary parody that would mature into the witty mitate-e of the mid-1760s, demonstrating how the artist expanded the subject range of ukiyo-e beyond bijin and yakusha.