Shoki (Chinese: Zhong Kui), the demon queller, standing on a bridge

Suzuki Harunobu's print of 'Shoki, the demon queller, standing on a bridge,' dated to about 1760, depicts the bearded martial deity known in Chinese as Zhong Kui, who guards households from malevolent spirits. Standing on a wooden bridge with sword in hand and his characteristic broad hat and beard, Shoki appears in Harunobu's hand stripped of the swaggering ferocity that other Edo artists tended to emphasize. The figure is more contained, almost ceremonial, in keeping with Harunobu's characteristic restraint. The subject was popular for Boys' Day prints and for talismans against illness and misfortune, and woodblock images of Shoki were eagerly purchased for household display. The Art Institute of Chicago, the museum source for this record, dates the impression to roughly 1760 and treats it as part of Harunobu's pre-nishiki-e period, before the 1765 advent of full polychrome printing transformed the commercial possibilities of his designs. Even so, the sheet is a useful counterweight to the familiar story that Suzuki Harunobu worked exclusively in delicate Edo bijin-ga: here he engages with a robustly masculine, protective subject. Collectors of Harunobu often value such genre departures because they show how the artist moved across the full range of contemporary print demand, from amatory and literary parody to apotropaic figural imagery, while keeping the careful linework and disciplined composition that link the body of his work together.