Hanging a Painting (parody of the Third Princess)

Hanging a Painting (parody of the Third Princess), a 1762 chuban print by Suzuki Harunobu in the Art Institute of Chicago, returns Suzuki Harunobu's attention to the Genji story of the Third Princess from a different angle. Where the 'cat-and-blind' scene shows the moment of disclosure, this mitate-e takes a more oblique approach: a contemporary Edo beauty is shown hanging a painting (kakemono), the act of arrangement serving as a discreet rhyme on the principle of the disturbed blind in the original Heian episode. Edo ukiyo-e parodies of the Genji frequently worked in this lateral mode, suggesting the source scene through analogous action rather than literal restaging, and Harunobu was one of the form's most accomplished practitioners. The young woman in modern dress is rendered in the elongated, doll-like proportions characteristic of Harunobu's chuban bijin-ga, while the suspended scroll provides the print's central diagonal and structural anchor. The viewer, recognizing the Third Princess's iconographic environment - the screened interior, the absent observer, the focal hanging - completes the parody as an active reader, drawing the line between Heian classic and Edo contemporary. As with the rest of Suzuki Harunobu's 1762 designs, the print precedes the full-color nishiki-e revolution of 1765 and uses a limited palette, yet already shows the spatial discipline that would soon make his work definitive for the polychromatic style. The Art Institute's impression preserves an unusually quiet example of the artist's lifelong dialogue with Murasaki Shikibu's novel through the medium of Edo ukiyo-e.