The Jewel River of Plovers (Chidori no Tamagawa), from the series "Six Jewel Rivers in Popular Customs (Fuzoku Mu Tamagawa)"

The Jewel River of Plovers (Chidori no Tamagawa), from Six Jewel Rivers in Popular Customs (Fuzoku Mu Tamagawa), dated 1764 in the Art Institute of Chicago, is one of Suzuki Harunobu's contributions to the Mu Tamagawa theme, a poetic cycle in which six different rivers named Tamagawa, each in a different province, become pretexts for landscape and figural compositions. Harunobu's series casts each river not as topographic record but as a backdrop for the popular customs of his own day, and here the famous plovers of the Chidori-Tamagawa, beloved of waka poets, ring a riverside scene populated by slender townspeople. The composition uses delicate horizontal banding for water and sky, with the printed figures placed in the foreground in the elongated, refined manner of his Edo bijin-ga. Issued just before the 1765 nishiki-e boom, the print already exhibits the careful color registration and subtle pigmenting that would become standard once polychrome techniques fully matured. Like other works in the cycle, it flatters viewers who recognize the classical poetic allusion while enjoying the modern dress and observed gestures of the figures. The Art Institute of Chicago's impression preserves Suzuki Harunobu's blend of poetic citation and contemporary genre at the moment his style was crystallizing into the standard for mid-Edo ukiyo-e.