Young Woman Walking in Snow with Umbrella

Young Woman Walking in Snow with Umbrella is a print associated with Suzuki Harunobu in the collection of the Cleveland Museum of Art (accession 1989.384). The composition shows a slender Edo townswoman picking her way through fresh snow, an open umbrella raised against the falling flakes, her layered robes and clogs lifted slightly clear of the ground. The motif of a beauty in the snow was one Harunobu and his followers returned to repeatedly: it allowed the designer to set the dark calligraphy of a paper umbrella, the small silhouette of a figure, and the cold paleness of a snowfall against one another in compositions that exploited the new resources of nishiki-e to their fullest. The catalogue entry on clevelandart.org records the print's year as 1868, well after Harunobu's death in 1770, indicating that the impression in Cleveland is a later edition, posthumous restrike, or copy after his design, of a kind that remained popular through the nineteenth century as collectors and publishers continued to draw on his Edo bijin-ga compositions. As a record of the persistence of his style, the sheet still embodies Harunobu's contribution to ukiyo-e: idealized, almost weightless figures, sensitive seasonal staging, and the use of brocade printing to render snow, paper, and woven cloth with equal delicacy. The Cleveland Museum of Art's online record at clevelandart.org under accession 1989.384 lists the work as Young Woman Walking in Snow with Umbrella in the context of Suzuki Harunobu's continuing influence on the bijin-ga of Edo.