Fulling Cloth

Suzuki Harunobu's "Fulling Cloth," dated about 1760 in the Art Institute of Chicago's records, draws on a deeply traditional theme in East Asian poetry and painting: the rhythmic beating of cloth on a fulling block, an autumnal labor whose sound was famously melancholy in classical Chinese and Japanese verse. In Edo ukiyo-e, the subject was customarily handled as a mitate-e, with the laborious act recast as an opportunity to show fashionable young women in slender, elegant poses. Harunobu's figures kneel or stand around the wooden block, mallets in hand, their long sleeves and patterned robes registered against simple architectural details so that the eye is led to the choreography of the gestures. As a principal architect of nishiki-e, the full-color "brocade print" technique that emerged around 1765, Suzuki Harunobu used multiple registered woodblocks to lay down the soft pinks, jades, and grays that lend his prints their characteristic dreaminess. The chuban format keeps the composition intimate, and the chuban bijin-ga tradition supplies the standard of elongated, weightless figures that he made his own. The Art Institute of Chicago preserves this impression as part of its substantial Harunobu holdings; for collectors and students of Edo ukiyo-e it shows how the artist turned a classical poetic conceit into a quietly modern image of women's labor and seasonal mood.