The Evening Bell of the Clock (Tokei no bansho), from the series "Eight Views of the Parlor (Zashiki hakkei)"

Suzuki Harunobu's "The Evening Bell of the Clock (Tokei no bansho)," from the series "Eight Views of the Parlor (Zashiki hakkei)," dated about 1761 in the Art Institute of Chicago's records, is part of one of his most celebrated mitate-e series, in which the canonical Eight Views of the Xiao and Xiang Rivers, long established in Chinese landscape painting and adapted to Lake Biwa as the Eight Views of Omi, are translated into the interior life of an Edo zashiki. Each title is converted into a domestic equivalent: "The Evening Bell at a Distant Temple" becomes the evening chiming of a parlor clock, an imported European mechanical timepiece, listened to by two slender figures whose chuban bijin-ga proportions and patterned robes mark them as 1760s Edo beauties. The witticism of the series depends on the precise but unexpected substitutions, and the clock here stands in for the temple bell of classical landscape. As one of the foundational practitioners of nishiki-e, the polychrome "brocade print" technique that revolutionized Edo ukiyo-e in the mid-1760s, Suzuki Harunobu used multiple precisely registered woodblocks to layer the soft pinks, jades, and grays that distinguish the series. The chuban format keeps the parlor intimate. The Art Institute of Chicago preserves the impression among its substantial Harunobu holdings, where the print stands as a benchmark example of his mitate-e wit.