Playing Battledore and Shuttlecock

"Playing Battledore and Shuttlecock" by Suzuki Harunobu, dated about 1760 in the Art Institute of Chicago's records, depicts the New Year's game of hanetsuki, in which young women paddled a feathered shuttlecock with decorated wooden battledores (hagoita). The game carried strong seasonal associations with the first weeks of the year in Edo ukiyo-e iconography and was favored as a subject because it allowed the artist to display slender bodies in dynamic, momentary poses without sacrificing the elegance demanded of chuban bijin-ga. Harunobu's figures here are characteristically attenuated, their long sleeves and patterned robes swirling around them as they reach for the shuttlecock. As one of the principal architects of nishiki-e, the full-color "brocade print" technique that emerged around 1765, Suzuki Harunobu used multiple registered woodblocks to layer pinks, greens, and grays into a coherent decorative pattern, with the falling shuttlecock animating an otherwise quiet ground. The chuban format keeps the composition intimate, the kind of sheet a collector could hold close to study the costume details. The Art Institute of Chicago preserves this impression alongside other Harunobu New Year scenes, and it offers a useful window onto the way Edo ukiyo-e wove seasonal pastime, fashionable dress, and innovative color printing into a single image.