Young Man and Woman on a Veranda with a Rooster and Hen

Suzuki Harunobu produced this print around 1768, the very period in which he was revolutionizing the medium by perfecting the nishiki-e, or "brocade picture": the technically demanding full-color woodblock print that required the precise registration of as many as ten separate carved blocks. Before Harunobu's innovations, commercially produced ukiyo-e prints relied on two or three colors at most; his introduction of nishiki-e in 1765, initially for privately commissioned calendar prints among Edo's cultured elite, transformed popular printmaking into a medium capable of sustained chromatic nuance. Young Man and Woman on a Veranda with a Rooster and Hen exemplifies the intimate, domestic register Harunobu favored: rather than the bold theatrical subjects of rival printmakers, he consistently returned to quiet vignettes of courtship, leisure, and seasonal observation, encoding layers of poetic and erotic allusion within scenes of apparent everyday life. The plum blossoms above the couple signal early spring and, by convention, romantic longing; the rooster and hen are a classical pairing freighted with associations of fidelity and domestic harmony. The work is held in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, where it stands as a representative example of Harunobu's mature style at the height of his brief but enormously influential career.