Two Beauties in a Boat

Suzuki Harunobu's 'Two Beauties in a Boat,' dated to about 1763, develops the artist's recurring interest in the waterways that webbed eighteenth-century Edo. The boat, drawn with the same line economy that Harunobu applied to figures and architecture, carries two elegant young women whose poses, costumes, and accessories evoke the contemporary bijin idiom rather than any literary precedent. Boat scenes were popular subjects in Edo bijin-ga because they combined the romance of travel with the choreography of bodies in confined spaces, and Harunobu's compositions exploit both possibilities. The Art Institute of Chicago, the museum source for this record, dates the impression to about 1763, immediately before the full polychrome nishiki-e revolution of 1765 in which Suzuki Harunobu played a defining role. The print uses a restrained palette but already organizes its colour, line, and negative space according to the principles that would define his mature multi-block work. For collectors of Suzuki Harunobu, prints featuring boats are an especially useful category: they show how Edo bijin-ga incorporated the city's distinctive water geography, the Sumida, the Nihonbashi canals, the boats that carried courtesans, customers, and provisions, into a vocabulary in which female beauty was inseparable from the urban environment. 'Two Beauties in a Boat' is a refined example of that vocabulary at the moment just before nishiki-e printing made it visible in unprecedented chromatic richness.