Young Woman Seated on a White Elephant (parody of the Bodhisattva Fugen)

Young Woman Seated on a White Elephant (parody of the Bodhisattva Fugen), a 1762 chuban print by Suzuki Harunobu in the Art Institute of Chicago, sits at the heart of the mitate-e tradition that Suzuki Harunobu did so much to define. The Bodhisattva Fugen (Samantabhadra), one of the principal attendants of Shakyamuni Buddha, was traditionally depicted seated on a six-tusked white elephant, embodying the practice of meditation and the wisdom of action. Edo ukiyo-e artists frequently parodied such Buddhist icons by replacing the sacred figure with a contemporary beauty, producing what scholars now call yatsushi-e (disguised pictures) or mitate-e. Harunobu's young woman, seated atop a stylized white elephant, is unmistakably a chuban bijin-ga heroine in modern kimono, and her self-possession invites the viewer to see in her the secular counterpart of religious composure. The pleasure of the print is the friction between the two readings - reverent and irreverent - which the Edo audience would have enjoyed simultaneously, much as they enjoyed the parodies of Tales of Ise or the Three Evening Poems. As with most of Harunobu's 1762 production, the print predates his role in the 1765 nishiki-e revolution and uses a controlled palette, but the design discipline - the elephant as graphic mass against the linear elegance of the figure - already foreshadows his polychromatic mastery. The Art Institute's impression is a particularly clear demonstration of how Suzuki Harunobu rewrote the language of sacred iconography in the dialect of Edo ukiyo-e.