The Lion Dance

Suzuki Harunobu's 'The Lion Dance,' dated to about 1764, depicts the celebrated performance form known in Japanese as shishi-mai, in which dancers wear a stylized lion's head and shake its mane to ward off evil and bless onlookers. The lion dance, originally derived from continental sources, had become an integral part of Japanese ritual and festive life, performed at New Year's, shrine festivals, and other auspicious occasions. In Harunobu's hands the dance is treated less as ethnographic record and more as a study in costume, gesture, and the gentle theatricality that bijin-ga frequently borrowed from kabuki and street performance. The Art Institute of Chicago, the museum source for this record, dates this impression to about 1764, just before the full polychrome nishiki-e revolution of 1765 that would dramatically expand the chromatic possibilities of Japanese woodblock prints. Harunobu's role in that revolution was decisive, and even in this earlier print one can already see the disciplined draughtsmanship and balanced negative space that would distinguish his later, fully nishiki-e work. For collectors and students of Suzuki Harunobu, lion-dance subjects offer a useful window on how Edo bijin-ga absorbed religious and seasonal performance into its repertoire, treating folk and ritual culture as part of the same urban visual world that produced its courtesans, teahouse waitresses, and literary parodies.