Girl Riding a Crane (parody of Hi Chobo [Chinese: Fei Zhangfang])

Girl Riding a Crane (parody of Hi Chobo), dated around 1761 and held by the Art Institute of Chicago, is a quintessential example of Suzuki Harunobu's mitate-e practice, in which classical Chinese subjects are wittily restaged with contemporary Edo beauties. The original referent is Fei Zhangfang (Hi Chobo in Japanese), a Daoist immortal famous for riding through the heavens on the back of a crane. Harunobu replaces the bearded sage with a slender young woman in patterned kimono, perched lightly atop the bird as it drifts through a featureless ground. The substitution is at once reverent and humorous, asking viewers steeped in Chinese painting traditions to recognize the iconographic source and to enjoy its translation into the visual language of Edo bijin-ga. Stylistically the print belongs to the moment just before Harunobu's full-color breakthrough: the palette remains restrained, the figure types are already those that would dominate his mature nishiki-e period, with willowy proportions and small, doll-like features. Suzuki Harunobu is widely credited with elevating the woodblock from a primarily theatrical and erotic medium into a vehicle for refined literary play, and prints like this one show why. The conceit only works for a sophisticated audience comfortable with Chinese legend and confident enough to laugh at its domestication, but Harunobu trusts his viewer entirely and rewards them with a composition of unusual elegance, in which the gentle curve of the crane's neck mirrors the soft sweep of the woman's robe.