The Kagura Dance

Suzuki Harunobu's 'The Kagura Dance,' dated to about 1763, depicts a ritual Shinto performance in the gentle, attenuated visual language for which the artist is famous. Kagura, sacred dances performed at shrines as offerings to the gods, were a familiar component of Edo religious and seasonal life, and the costumes worn by the dancers, often shrine maidens or priests, were instantly recognizable to contemporary viewers. Harunobu's treatment is characteristically restrained: rather than emphasizing theatrical movement or spectacular ritual paraphernalia, he renders the figures with the calm, slender bodies and clean linework that define his contribution to mid-eighteenth-century Edo bijin-ga. The Art Institute of Chicago, the museum source for this record, dates the print to about 1763, placing it within Harunobu's mature period and immediately before his role in launching the full polychrome nishiki-e print in 1765. Even prior to that technical revolution, Harunobu's compositions are already organized around a confident negative space and a small number of colours used to articulate fabric, ground, and face. For collectors and students of Suzuki Harunobu, Kagura subjects show how the artist incorporated religious and ceremonial life into his expansive view of contemporary Edo society. Rather than reserving such subjects for specialist religious imagery, he treated them as one more facet of the urban world worth depicting in his graceful, restrained idiom.