Ehon haru no nishiki

Ehon haru no nishiki, an illustrated book associated with Suzuki Harunobu and held by the Art Institute of Chicago, takes its title from a poetic image of spring as a many-colored brocade, a metaphor that resonates with particular force in the work of the artist who is closely identified with the maturation of polychrome nishiki-e, literally brocade pictures. As an ehon, the volume belongs to the parallel tradition of printed books that ran alongside Edo ukiyo-e's single-sheet output, and it gave Harunobu and his collaborators the chance to design sequences of seasonal images structured by accompanying texts. The spring theme indicated by the title would have invited images of cherry blossoms, kerria, young leaves, and the soft pastimes associated with the season in mid-eighteenth-century Japan, all of which suit Harunobu's chuban bijin-ga sensibility. Within the broader publishing economy of mid-1760s and later Edo, such books complemented the single-sheet print and helped diffuse the visual language of ukiyo-e well beyond the circle of dedicated print collectors. The Art Institute of Chicago's holding documents Harunobu's participation in this medium and reinforces the picture of him as not only the leading figure of the nishiki-e revolution but also a designer comfortable across the full range of Edo ukiyo-e printed formats.