Woman Holding a Branch of Kerria Flowers in the Rain (parody of Ota Dokan)
- Date:
- c. 1766/67
- Medium:
- Color woodblock print; chuban
- Source:
- Art Institute of Chicago
In this 1761 chuban print, Suzuki Harunobu offers a mitate of a celebrated anecdote about the fifteenth-century warrior and poet Ota Dokan, who is said to have learned a lesson in classical poetry when, sheltering from rain, a country girl silently offered him a branch of yamabuki (kerria) blossoms in lieu of a straw raincoat she could not provide. The story turns on Dokan's eventual recognition of the poetic source for the gesture, drawn from a famous waka, and his subsequent commitment to study. Harunobu transposes this Muromachi-era anecdote into a contemporary Edo setting, with a young woman of mid-eighteenth-century type holding the symbolic branch of kerria flowers in the rain. The classical reference, while removed from the visual surface, is encoded in the central motif of the branch itself, and the print is a richly characteristic example of the literary game that mitate-e plays. The figure is rendered in Harunobu's idealized chuban bijin-ga style, slim, oval-faced, and gently attentive, and the rain is suggested through a few discreet pictorial conventions. Made in the years immediately preceding the 1765 emergence of full-color nishiki-e, the design demonstrates the careful color planning that brocade printing would soon make standard across Edo ukiyo-e. The Art Institute of Chicago holds an impression of this Suzuki Harunobu print, which encapsulates his ability to compress historical anecdote, classical poetry, and contemporary fashion into a single elegant sheet.
c. 1767/68
Color woodblock print; hashira-e
c. 1767/68
Color woodblock print; chuban
c. 1767/68
Color woodblock print; chuban
c. 1764/65
Color woodblock print; hosoban, mizu-e
Woman Holding a Branch of Kerria Flowers in the Rain (parody of Ota Dokan) was created by Suzuki Harunobu (鈴木春信) in c. 1766/67.
Woman Holding a Branch of Kerria Flowers in the Rain (parody of Ota Dokan) depicts birds & flowers and rain.
