Tickling her foot

Tickling her foot by Suzuki Harunobu records a small, comic moment in a relaxed Edo interior, where one figure teases another by touching the sole of her foot, drawing a sudden gesture of response. The composition demonstrates Harunobu's gift for psychological observation: rather than dramatizing the encounter, he captures the play of bodies in space, the curve of the seated figure's torso as she pulls back, the soft mischief of the second figure's hand. Such intimate, slightly impish scenes were a feature of Edo bijin-ga in the years after Suzuki Harunobu helped to inaugurate full-color nishiki-e in 1765. With the new technology of registered multi-block printing, designers could render the fine textures of robe patterning, the bare skin of an exposed foot, and the muted tones of an interior with a unity that earlier benizuri-e could not achieve. Harunobu uses these capacities here to make the small joke land softly: the robe patterns show clearly, the skin is rendered with restraint, and the geometry of the figures' arrangement is balanced and stable even as the depicted moment is one of motion. The print invites viewers to share the pleasure of unstructured intimacy rather than to decode a literary reference, a register Harunobu cultivated throughout his Edo bijin-ga output. Source: Art Institute of Chicago, no. 20943.