Harunobu Captures the Mundane

Suzuki Harunobu's "Mother and Child with Bird". Note how, aside from slight flushes of colour on the bird and floor, there remains almost no graduation of colour at all in the work. Each colour is a solid block of tone in this traditional Japanese woodcut. Something about traditional Japanese woodcuts is just so appealing - they're always full of such simplicity, yet the simplicity seems so intense at the same time. Harunobu was known for making a lot of prints from seemingly mundane domestic scenes such as this - exhibiting a side culture at the time that was seldom seen with samurai and actors and scenic prints seeming to dominate the Japanese print scene (at least from my point of view). I scanned this from a portfolio book.

This was a scanning mistake I made. I thought it looked neat, so I included it.