Suzuki Harunobu (c. 1725-1770) Japanese, Color Woodblock Print. Title: "Woman Visiting a Shrine on a Rainy and Windy Night." First printed about 1766. Label with artist and image information attached to back. 

Overall: 15 1/4 x 11 1/8 in.

Sight: 9 1/2 x 7 1/2 in.

#2927 . 

Suzuki Harunobu was born c. 1725, possibly in Kyoto, Japan. Little is known of Harunobu’s early life, but what is clear is that he was from a samurai family, with an ancestor who was a retainer of Tokugawa Ieyasu in Mikawa Province. Much of his early work is in the Edo style, showing influences from numerous artists including Torii Kiyomitsu, Ishikawa Toyonobu, and both the Kawamata and Kanō school. However, his greatest influence came from the ukiyo-e master Nishikawa Sukenobu, who he apprenticed under some time in his teens. Unlike most ukiyo-e artists, Harunobu used his real name rather than a pseudonym or an earlier artist’s name. Harunobu gained early fame by depicting ordinary urban life in Edo, showing the customary geishas, courtesans, actors, and sumo wrestlers alongside street vendors, errand boys, and farmers in fields. His work was rich in literary and visual allusion, and he often quoted Japanese classical poetry in his images, although the accompanying illustrations often gently poked fun at their subject matter. In 1764, as a result of his social connections, he was asked to aid a group of intellectual samurais in their efforts to create e-goyomi, which are picture calendars whose dates can only be deciphered by reading cryptic markings throughout them. Harunobu’s calendars, which incorporated the calculations of the lunar calendar into their images, were enthusiastically exchanged at Edo gatherings and parties. He became very wealthy due to numerous samurai patrons, and experimented with better woods for woodblocks, which led him to invent the nishiki-e (brocade print), as well as popularizing cherry wood instead of catalpa and encouraging printing with multiple separate wood blocks to create clever effects and better clarity. The quality of the art increased by leaps and bounds, and Harunobu’s method of using more than just three colors in ukiyo-e (with as many as ten) began a golden age of full-color prints. Harunobu became one of the primary producers of images of bijin-ga (pictures of beautiful women), but refused to produce prints of kabuki actors, reported to have said, “Why should I paint pictures of such trash as Kabuki actors?” In a few special cases, notably his famous set of eight prints entitled Zashiki hakkei (Eight Parlor Views), the patron’s name appears on the print along with, or in place of, his own, a novel development in ukiyo-e of this time. Between 1765 and 1770 Harunobu created twenty illustrated books and over one thousand color prints, along with a number of large-scale paintings. He was regarded as the master of ukiyo-e during these last years of his life, and was widely imitated until almost a decade after his death on July 8th, 1770, when he was only 46.