Throwing the Shuttle

Suzuki Harunobu's 1761 chuban print Throwing the Shuttle depicts a young woman at a hand loom, in the act of casting the shuttle across the warp. The subject is rooted in the daily textile labor that supported much of Edo's clothing economy, and Harunobu joins a long tradition of Japanese prints and paintings that find aesthetic and poetic value in weaving. The loom, often a freestanding wooden frame, is rendered with the kind of summary precision that anchors the figure in real space, while the woman herself is treated in Harunobu's idealized chuban bijin-ga manner, with elongated limbs and small features that convey patient attention rather than physical strain. The motion of the shuttle is suggested through pose rather than blur, true to the conventions of mid-eighteenth-century Edo ukiyo-e, which favored graphic clarity over the depiction of motion. The print also participates in a longer literary and poetic association of weaving with female labor and with the Tanabata festival, where the Weaver Star meets her cowherd lover across the celestial river, and viewers in the kyoka literary circles would have been attuned to such resonance. Made shortly before the 1765 emergence of full-color nishiki-e, the design demonstrates Harunobu's careful planning of pattern and palette that the new brocade printing would soon enable across his oeuvre. The Art Institute of Chicago preserves this impression, allowing study of Suzuki Harunobu's distinctive treatment of women's craft labor as material for refined Edo ukiyo-e design.