Young Couple Enjoying the Cool of Evening

Young Couple Enjoying the Cool of Evening, a color woodblock print in chuban format dating to around 1771/72, is preserved in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago. The subject — yūsuzumi, the summer-evening custom of escaping the day's heat outdoors — was a perennial theme in Edo period ukiyo-e, evoking the cool of riverside breezes, lantern-lit verandas, and the relaxed sociability of warm-weather city life. Harushige's treatment shows a young man and woman in summer kimono, the figures composed in the elongated, willow-slender proportions characteristic of Suzuki Harunobu's mature style. The print's palette of soft mauves, pale yellows, and muted greens, together with the delicate outline of the figures and their setting, places the work firmly in the immediate post-Harunobu moment when Harushige was producing some of the most accomplished bijin-ga in Edo. The intimate scale of the chuban format suits the quiet, observational mood of the subject, in which the two figures appear to share an unspoken companionship characteristic of mitate-e treatments of classical love themes. The print is a clear demonstration of why so many of Harushige's woodblocks were long attributed to Harunobu himself — a confusion the artist later claimed, in his autobiographical writings, to have actively cultivated.