The Courtesan Agemaki

The Courtesan Agemaki, recorded on ukiyo-e.org from the Audain Art Museum / Greater Victoria Art Gallery collection, depicts one of the most celebrated literary courtesans of Edo theatrical and prose tradition. Agemaki was the female protagonist of the long-running Sukeroku cycle, in which her devotion to the dashing hero Sukeroku and her conflict with the wealthy and elderly Ikyu form one of the most popular romantic narratives of the eighteenth-century stage. Suzuki Harunobu's print translates the dramatic figure into the visual idiom that he had established for Edo bijin-ga: a slender, doll-like body, elaborate piled hair, and the soft palette of pinks, greens, and pale blues that his mature nishiki-e production made standard. As a leading designer of the new multi-block full-color technique that emerged after 1765, Suzuki Harunobu repeatedly drew on theatrical and literary sources, treating their famous female figures less as portrait subjects than as opportunities to display the conventions of his idealized feminine type. By collapsing the legendary Agemaki into the same body and pose that he used for ordinary contemporary bijin, Harunobu links the theatrical and the everyday in a single image, suggesting that the cultivated young women of Edo were the spiritual heirs of the famous courtesans of fiction. The print exemplifies the lyrical, mood-rich character that defines his contribution to the early years of nishiki-e.