Gathering Bamboo Shoots

Suzuki Harunobu's "Gathering Bamboo Shoots," dated about 1760 in the Art Institute of Chicago's records, takes a humble springtime task and refines it into a poised exercise in chuban bijin-ga design. Bamboo shoots (takenoko) were a celebrated spring delicacy in Edo, and the act of digging them up was associated both with rural life and with the traditional virtue of filial piety, since the Twenty-four Paragons of Filial Piety includes the story of Meng Zong, who melted snow with his tears to find winter shoots for his mother. Harunobu and his peers in Edo ukiyo-e frequently handled such classical subjects in the mitate-e mode, casting the protagonist as a fashionable contemporary figure rather than an ancient sage. The figures here are characteristically slender and weightless, their patterned robes and small features marking the work as chuban bijin-ga at its most refined. As a principal architect of nishiki-e, the polychrome "brocade print" technique that emerged around 1765, Suzuki Harunobu used multiple precisely registered woodblocks to lay down the soft pinks, jades, and grays that distinguish his palette. The chuban format keeps the bamboo grove intimate and the seasonal mood close. The Art Institute of Chicago preserves this impression among its substantial Harunobu holdings, where it offers a model of how the artist refracted classical exemplars through floating-world fashion.