Night Rain at Karasaki (Karasaki yau), from the series "Eight Views of Omi (Omi hakkei no uchi)"
- Date:
- early 1760s
- Medium:
- Color woodblock print; hosoban, benizuri-e
- Source:
- Art Institute of Chicago
Suzuki Harunobu's "Night Rain at Karasaki (Karasaki yau)," from the series "Eight Views of Omi (Omi hakkei no uchi)," dated about 1760 in the Art Institute of Chicago's records, belongs to the artist's exploration of the celebrated Eight Views of Lake Biwa, a Japanese adaptation of the Chinese Eight Views of the Xiao and Xiang Rivers that supplied Edo ukiyo-e with a ready-made geography of poetic moods. "Night Rain at Karasaki" is fixed in the canon by the great pine of the Karasaki Shrine on the western shore of the lake, and Harunobu uses it as a setting for his typically mitate-e response, replacing the conventional landscape with figures of fashionable women whose sleeves and umbrellas register the falling rain. The bodies are slender and weightless in the standard chuban bijin-ga idiom, and the famous pine is reduced to a graphic emblem rather than a topographical record. As a principal architect of nishiki-e, the polychrome "brocade print" technique that emerged in Edo around 1765, Suzuki Harunobu used multiple registered woodblocks to lay down the soft greys and muted greens that suit a rainy night. The chuban format keeps the scene intimate. The Art Institute of Chicago preserves this impression among its substantial Harunobu holdings, where it exemplifies the artist's ability to overlay classical landscape geography with the contemporary urban life of Edo.
1962
Woodblock print, ink and color on paper
c. 1833-36
Woodblock print (nishiki-e); ink and color on paper
Ame no Omiya
1930
Color woodblock print; oban
Teradomari no yau
1921
Color woodblock print; oban
Night Rain at Karasaki (Karasaki yau), from the series "Eight Views of Omi (Omi hakkei no uchi)" was created by Suzuki Harunobu (鈴木春信) in early 1760s.
Night Rain at Karasaki (Karasaki yau), from the series "Eight Views of Omi (Omi hakkei no uchi)" depicts rain.
