Evening Snow on a Floss Shaper (Nurioke no bosetsu), from the series "Eight Views of the Parlor (Zashiki hakkei)"
- Date:
- c. 1766
- Medium:
- Color woodblock print; chuban
- Source:
- Art Institute of Chicago
Evening Snow on a Floss Shaper (Nurioke no bosetsu), dating from around 1761, belongs to Suzuki Harunobu's celebrated series Eight Views of the Parlor (Zashiki hakkei), an inventive mitate that transposes the canonical Eight Views of the Xiao and Xiang Rivers from Chinese landscape painting onto small, intimate domestic scenes. In this print, held by the Art Institute of Chicago, two young women bend over a nurioke, the lacquered tub used to spread and dry raw silk floss. The mound of soft white floss substitutes for the snowdrifts of the Chinese model, while the women's quiet absorption stands in for the muted hush of a winter evening. The series was produced as a luxury commission for the privately published calendar prints (e-goyomi) circulated within Edo's poetry and connoisseurship circles, and Harunobu's command of the new full-color nishiki-e technique is on full display here in the carefully registered blocks, soft gradations, and refined embossing. As a leading practitioner of Edo bijin-ga, Suzuki Harunobu was less interested in the spectacle of the Yoshiwara than in the domestic interiors of the merchant class, and Zashiki hakkei is among the most refined expressions of that interest. The print rewards close reading: the inset poem at upper right plays on the homophonic possibilities of the title, while the placement of the women and the floss tub mirrors the diagonal recession of classical river scenes. It is a virtuoso demonstration of how a serious literary conceit could be miniaturized and domesticated within the new chromatic language of the woodblock medium.
Woodblock print
Woodblock print
20th century
Woodblock print; ink and color on paper
19th century
Ukiyo-e woodblock print; ink and color on paper
Evening Snow on a Floss Shaper (Nurioke no bosetsu), from the series "Eight Views of the Parlor (Zashiki hakkei)" was created by Suzuki Harunobu (鈴木春信) in c. 1766.
Evening Snow on a Floss Shaper (Nurioke no bosetsu), from the series "Eight Views of the Parlor (Zashiki hakkei)" depicts winter.
