Making a Giant Snowball

Making a Giant Snowball, dating from about 1762 and preserved in the Art Institute of Chicago, captures one of Suzuki Harunobu's most appealing winter scenes: a small group of young women rolling an enormous ball of snow across a garden. The composition is built around the diagonal arc of the snowball, a smooth white mass that dominates the foreground while the women cluster on either side, pushing and steadying it with their sleeves drawn tight against the cold. The subject is unusually playful even by Harunobu's standards, and yet the figures retain the slender, almost adolescent elegance that would become his trademark. Their kimono, picked out in soft tonal blocks, are drawn with the loose calligraphic line that defines his mature style. The print belongs to the broader category of seasonal genre scenes that Suzuki Harunobu used to anchor Edo bijin-ga in everyday urban life, alongside parlor games, viewing parties, and snowy walks home from the bath. Made just before the full nishiki-e breakthrough of 1765, the print already shows the careful registration and limited but precisely chosen palette that the new technique would soon make standard. The image is a small revelation in the history of Japanese printmaking, demonstrating that the slender beauties Harunobu helped invent were not only literary types but participants in genuine, embodied activities, capable of laughing, exerting themselves, and inhabiting the chilly air of an Edo winter afternoon.