Drinking a Cup of Wine Before Retiring for Bed (From an Untitled Series)

Drinking a Cup of Wine Before Retiring for Bed (from an Untitled Series), dated about 1765 and held in the Cleveland Museum of Art (accession 1916.940), is a Suzuki Harunobu print of an Edo interior at the close of an evening. A young woman, dressed in the layered robes characteristic of his Edo bijin-ga, lifts a small cup of sake before turning in for the night, while another figure or a familiar set of domestic accessories rounds out the small scene. The motif - quiet drinking before bed - belongs to the broader repertoire of late-night and after-hours subjects that Harunobu cultivated alongside his daytime images of beauties at leisure. The print belongs to the early years of full-color nishiki-e and exemplifies the way Harunobu used the new medium for intimate genre subjects as well as for showpiece compositions. Soft pinks for the woman's skin, mineral greens and grays for her robes, and a quietly graded ground are brought into careful registration on heavy hosho paper, so that the small, mostly empty scene can carry the weight of the design. By framing a private gesture - a single cup of wine at the end of the day - within the visual language of Edo bijin-ga, Harunobu turns an unremarkable nighttime habit into a meditation on the slow rhythms of the floating world. The Cleveland Museum of Art's online record at clevelandart.org documents the print under accession 1916.940 as Drinking a Cup of Wine Before Retiring for Bed (from an Untitled Series) by Suzuki Harunobu.