Sumirena: The Mistress of Yojiya (Yojiya musume, Sumirena), from the series "Beauties of the Floating World Compared to Flowers (Ukiyo bijin hana ni yosu)"
- Date:
- c. 1768/69
- Medium:
- Color woodblock print; chuban
- Source:
- Art Institute of Chicago
Sumirena, the Mistress of Yojiya, from Suzuki Harunobu's series Beauties of the Floating World Compared to Flowers (Ukiyo bijin hana ni yosu), dates to 1763 and is held by the Art Institute of Chicago. The print belongs to a category of mitate bijin-ga in which celebrated tea-house and shop attendants are paired with seasonal flowers, the floral allusion expanding each woman's identity into a poetic emblem. Sumirena, here named as the daughter or mistress of the Yojiya establishment, became one of the famous beauties of mid-eighteenth-century Edo, her image circulated through print culture in a way that anticipates later commercial celebrity. Harunobu places her slender figure against a sparse ground, allowing the carefully patterned kimono and her oval face to register without competing detail. The series belongs to a tradition of comparing women to flowers, in which named beauties stood in for blossoms whose qualities they were imagined to embody. As one of the foundational designers of nishiki-e, Harunobu uses the developing full-color technique to balance muted tones across the figure's robes while sustaining the integrity of outline that anchors Edo bijin-ga. The figure's narrow shoulders, small features, and slightly bowed neck embody his characteristic ideal, more poetic abstraction than realistic portrait. Edo viewers would have recognized Sumirena from contemporary reputation, and the series invited collectors to assemble a small floral album of named beauties spread across the city's licensed and commercial districts. The Art Institute of Chicago's catalogue entry situates this impression within Harunobu's early experiments with named-beauty series, prefiguring the dedicated cult of identifiable tea-house women that would dominate Edo bijin-ga in subsequent decades.
c. 1767/68
Color woodblock print; hashira-e
c. 1767/68
Color woodblock print; chuban
c. 1767/68
Color woodblock print; chuban
c. 1764/65
Color woodblock print; hosoban, mizu-e
Sumirena: The Mistress of Yojiya (Yojiya musume, Sumirena), from the series "Beauties of the Floating World Compared to Flowers (Ukiyo bijin hana ni yosu)" was created by Suzuki Harunobu (鈴木春信) in c. 1768/69.
Sumirena: The Mistress of Yojiya (Yojiya musume, Sumirena), from the series "Beauties of the Floating World Compared to Flowers (Ukiyo bijin hana ni yosu)" depicts birds & flowers.
