Man Pulling at a Woman's Kimono

Suzuki Harunobu's 'Man Pulling at a Woman's Kimono,' dated to about 1763, captures a fleeting moment of erotic suggestion of the kind the artist made central to Edo bijin-ga. A male figure tugs at a woman's outer robe in a gesture that is simultaneously playful, importunate, and economically charged, a familiar episode in the popular literature and theatre of Edo. Harunobu, true to his manner, refuses to caricature either party: both bodies are drawn with the same slender elongation and small heads that mark all his figures, and the encounter is presented with the same calm linear economy he uses for tea-stall vignettes or moon-viewing scenes. The result is a print in which the eroticism is implied rather than explicit, depending on the viewer's familiarity with the gestures and conventions of the floating world. The Art Institute of Chicago, the museum source for this record, dates the impression to about 1763, locating it in the years immediately before Harunobu's contribution to the nishiki-e revolution of 1765. Although the print uses a limited palette, the composition already shows the discipline that distinguishes his later, fully polychrome work: a measured pictorial rhythm and an unwavering attention to the lines of textile and limb. For collectors of Suzuki Harunobu, such genre subjects illustrate how thoroughly he domesticated romantic and erotic narratives into the textures of ordinary urban life.