Praying for Rain Komachi (Amagoi Komachi)

Praying for Rain Komachi (Amagoi Komachi), a color woodblock print in chuban format dating to around 1770, belongs to a long tradition of mitate-e prints that recast the legendary ninth-century poetess Ono no Komachi into contemporary Edo dress. The Komachi cycle — a set of seven canonical episodes from her life — was a favorite subject for ukiyo-e designers, who delighted in transposing courtly classical scenes into the visual idiom of the floating world. The Amagoi (rain-praying) Komachi episode recalls the moment when, during a great drought, Komachi was said to have composed a waka so moving that the heavens released rain. Harushige's treatment, held in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago, depicts not the legendary poetess but a young Edo beauty whose pose and accoutrements gesture knowingly to the classical theme. The chuban format and refined palette — mauves, soft sages, and pale yellows characteristic of the immediate post-Harunobu period — exemplify Harushige's command of the style of Suzuki Harunobu, the master whose 1770 death had created a stylistic vacancy that Harushige stepped directly into filling. The print's elegant, willow-slender figure with the small head, narrow shoulders, and delicately arched eyebrows shows how completely Harushige had absorbed Harunobu's compositional vocabulary in the early 1770s, before his eventual turn toward Western-style painting under the name Shiba Kōkan.