Two Itinerant Musicians

Suzuki Harunobu's "Two Itinerant Musicians," dated about 1760 in the Art Institute of Chicago's records, depicts a pair of traveling performers whose presence in the streets of Edo was a familiar feature of urban life. Such figures, whether male or female, blind or sighted, koto or shamisen players, occupied an ambiguous social position that fascinated Edo ukiyo-e artists: at once peripheral and ubiquitous, they could be assimilated to the fashionable beauty type or treated as character studies of a more documentary kind. Harunobu's pair are characteristically slender and weightless in the chuban bijin-ga idiom, their patterned robes carefully registered against the spare ground of the sheet, their instruments and travel boxes signaling their profession. As a principal architect of nishiki-e, the polychrome "brocade print" technique that revolutionized Edo printmaking around 1765, Suzuki Harunobu used multiple precisely registered woodblocks to layer the soft pinks, jades, and grays that lend his work its dreamy atmosphere. The chuban format keeps the encounter intimate and collectible. The Art Institute of Chicago preserves the impression among its substantial Harunobu holdings, where the print stands as a record of how the artist could refract the social diversity of Edo's streets through his idealized vision of slender, elegant figures shaped by nishiki-e's new color resources.