Pulling a Flower Cart

Suzuki Harunobu's "Pulling a Flower Cart," dated about 1760 in the Art Institute of Chicago's records, picks up a familiar mitate-e device, in which a celebrated court ritual is recast in the slender, fashionable bodies of 1760s Edo. The flower cart (hanaguruma) carried strong courtly associations through its links with palace processions, while in Edo ukiyo-e it became a vehicle for showing women drawing or surrounding a cart laden with seasonal blossoms, often peonies or cherry. The figures here are characteristically attenuated and weightless, their patterned robes and small features marking the work as chuban bijin-ga at its most refined; the cart and its blossoms supply the graphic anchor of the composition while the figures distribute themselves along its diagonal. As a principal architect of nishiki-e, the full-color "brocade print" technique that emerged in Edo around 1765, Suzuki Harunobu used multiple precisely registered woodblocks to layer the soft pinks, jades, and grays that lend the scene its decorative warmth. The chuban format keeps the procession intimate, suited to close handling and contemplative collecting. The Art Institute of Chicago preserves this impression among its substantial Harunobu holdings, where the print serves as a study of how the artist could fuse classical court reference and seasonal display into a single coherent exercise in nishiki-e design.