Giving Daruma a Smoke

Giving Daruma a Smoke, dated 1765 and held by the Art Institute of Chicago, is one of Suzuki Harunobu's witty mitate prints in which a sacred subject is recast as everyday genre. The composition pairs a young Edo woman with the bearded figure of Bodhidharma, the Indian patriarch of Zen Buddhism known in Japan as Daruma, who appears here as a tubby red-robed presence beside her. With deadpan charm she extends a lit pipe toward him, inviting the venerable monk to share a draw of tobacco, a deliberate collision of the spiritual and the mundane that delighted sophisticated Edo audiences. Such parodies were central to the playful intellectual culture of the mid-eighteenth century, and Harunobu was among the most inventive practitioners. As a foundational designer of nishiki-e, he uses the new full-color technique to balance Daruma's bold vermillion against the cool muted tones of the woman's kimono, allowing the comic encounter to register at a glance. Tobacco culture had become firmly entrenched in Edo by this date, and pipes, lacquered cases, and tabako-bon braziers appear repeatedly in bijin-ga as fashionable accessories. By placing the pipe in the woman's hand and offering it to the founder of Chan and Zen Buddhism, Harunobu lets contemporary leisure infiltrate religious iconography without disrespect, the joke depending on viewers' deep familiarity with Daruma's stern legend. The slender figure with her small oval face and elongated limbs exemplifies Harunobu's Edo bijin-ga ideal, while Daruma's compact rounded form supplies a visual counterweight. The Art Institute of Chicago's catalogue entry situates this impression within Harunobu's prolific 1765 output, the year that nishiki-e calendar prints catalyzed the artist's full-color experiments and accelerated his shift toward witty mitate compositions.