Two Girls Leaving a Boat

Suzuki Harunobu's 'Two Girls Leaving a Boat,' dated to about 1762, depicts an everyday vignette of Edo urban life rendered with the artist's signature gentleness. The two young women, drawn with the slender proportions and small heads that mark Harunobu's mature manner, disembark from a small craft in a moment that is neither narrative climax nor erotic episode but simply a quiet transition. The print belongs to the larger project of Edo bijin-ga in which contemporary women's daily movements, walking, alighting, gathering at a teahouse, were treated with the same compositional seriousness once reserved for classical or theatrical subjects. The Art Institute of Chicago, the museum source for this record, dates the impression to about 1762, just before the public arrival of full polychrome nishiki-e in 1765. Harunobu's role in that revolution is well documented, and even in this earlier print the compositional discipline that would distinguish his later, more chromatically expansive work is already in place. The boat is sketched in economical line, and the women's bodies dominate the field without crowding it. For collectors and students of Suzuki Harunobu, prints of this kind illustrate how thoroughly he absorbed the river and canal life of Edo, the boats that ran from Asakusa to Ryogoku and elsewhere, into the visual lexicon of bijin-ga, making the city's waterborne traffic into part of the texture of feminine modernity.