Ono no Komachi Washing the Book

Suzuki Harunobu's "Ono no Komachi Washing the Book," dated about 1761 in the Art Institute of Chicago's records, evokes one of the celebrated episodes attributed to the Heian poet Ono no Komachi, a member of the Six Immortal Poets renowned both for the beauty of her verse and for the legends that grew up around her. According to a famous Noh narrative, Komachi defeated a rival poet, Otomo no Kuronushi, by washing the page of an anthology to reveal that he had secretly added her poem in advance to discredit her. Harunobu treats the episode in his mitate-e mode, recasting Komachi as a contemporary beauty in the slender, elongated body type that defines his chuban bijin-ga, her concentration on the basin of water turning the legend into a quiet domestic scene. As one of the foundational practitioners of nishiki-e, the polychrome "brocade print" technique that revolutionized Edo printmaking around 1765, Suzuki Harunobu used multiple precisely registered woodblocks to layer the soft pinks, jades, and grays that lend the scene its meditative atmosphere. The chuban format keeps the figure intimate and the literary allusion close. The Art Institute of Chicago preserves the impression among its substantial Harunobu holdings, where it stands as a model of how the artist could fuse classical literary memory with the contemporary fashion of Edo ukiyo-e.