item details
Overview
The early works of Suzuki Harunobu (c. 1725–70) drew on Yamato-e ‘Japanese picture’ precedents, recording genre scenes of everyday life and festivals, and people at work and play, in delicately designed compositions. By the mid-1760s, however, he had become a bijin-ga specialist, focusing especially on informal views of young, self-absorbed and elegantly disposed young women. He quickly capitalised on the most recent innovations of pigment and print registration technology and the potential they afforded for recording the intricate geometric patterns and elegant colour harmonies of chic fashions of the day. His amalgams of delicately provocative poses, restrained decoration and tasteful colour established the precedent for what the aesthetician Shūzō Kuki (1888–1941) later referred to as the ‘artistic structure’ of a sensibility of iki (‘provocative chic’) style.
Harunobu’s public were intrigued by his playful innovations in the field of mitate, ‘parody’, ‘metaphoric comparison’, or engaging visual and intellectual plays on elegant themes. In the hashira-e (pillar-print) Ide no Tamagawa, the play melds intersecting themes from Edo, medieval Heian-kyō (today’s Kyoto) and Chinese aesthetic conventions. Its immediate reference is to Japanese landscape conventions, and especially to the popular Füzoku no tamagawa ('Six Crystal Rivers’) theme. In this example, the girls are dipping their geta-clad toes into the cool waters of the tamagawa (‘crystal river’) at Ide. The yamabuki (literally ‘mountain breath’) dark yellow mountain rose (Kerria japonica) on the bank behind the figures is especially associated with this river. The subject draws on Chinese precedents in the classical landscape theme of Xiao Xiang ba jing – the eight views of the Xiao and Xiang Rivers. The pictorial motifs find an imperial court link here in the portrait of the poet Fujiwarano Shunzei (1114–1204) and his verse:
koma tomete I’ll halt my pony
nao mizu kawan and water him again, where
yamabuki no the yamabuki
hana no tsuyu flowers mingle dewdrops with the
Ide no Tamagawa Crystal River at Ide.
Dewdrops, together with dew-damp sleeves, had been a common metaphor for tears since the Heian period (794–1185). The unusual and structurally challenging format of hashira-e provided an ideal format for these elegant essays in mitate-e (play). It offered both Harunobu and his follower Isoda Koryūsai (1735–90), also represented in Te Papa's collection, an appropriate field for arranging the complex interlacing shapes of landscape, poet, verse and figures within an ordering structure of gracefully falling lines and intersecting alternations of decorative (positive) and plain (negative) spatial fields.
Source: David Bell, 'Floating world at Te Papa: the Heriot collection', Tuhinga, 30 (2019), pp. 56-81.
Dr Mark Stocker Curator, Historical International Art May 2019