Silhouette of a Priest

A small color woodblock print by Suzuki Shōnen, dated around 1881 and held by the Honolulu Museum of Art (James Michener Collection, acc. 19283). The print belongs to a small group of silhouette prints that Shōnen designed in the early 1880s, in which a single figure appears as a dark silhouette against a faintly tinted ground. The technique departs from the polychrome elaboration of Edo [nishiki-e](/glossary/nishiki-e) and is closer to European silhouette albums and contemporary Kyoto craft-book illustration; the figure of the priest — tonsured, in robes, with the simplified contour of a [sumi](/glossary/sumi)-line drawing — reads almost as a calligraphic exercise. The series is among the earliest dated evidence of Shōnen's involvement with the woodblock medium and shows him drawn, like Kōno Bairei in the same years, to the design economy of single-color printing rather than the brocade-print tradition.