Evening Snow on the Heater
Original title
Suzuki Harunobu 鈴木春信
- Institution
- The Metropolitan Museum of Art ↗
- Accession
- JP2449
- Credit
- The Howard Mansfield Collection, Purchase, Rogers Fund, 1936
- Rights
Public domain: the artist died in 1770. The Metropolitan Museum of Art releases this image under CC0 through its Open Access programme.
- Description
- Two young women in a quiet room with a lattice window and patterned paper walls. One sits smoking a long pipe; the other kneels to stretch silk floss over a lacquered dome-shaped form, and more white floss lies on the matting, printed without ink and embossed so that it rises from the paper like small drifts of snow.
- Image
- 1170 × 1600
source file retrieved 2026-10-11 - Catalogue no.
- G-009011
coldlibrary.com/g/009011 - Credit line
- Suzuki Harunobu, Evening Snow on the Heater, series c. 1766; this impression late 18th century. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, public domain (CC0). Via Cold Library: https://coldlibrary.com/g/009011
From Harunobu’s Eight Parlor Views (c. 1766), which moves the classical Eight Views of the Xiao and Xiang rivers indoors. The Met catalogues it as Evening Snow on the Heater, but the white domes are silk floss stretched over lacquered drying forms (nurioke), and that floss is the evening snow of the title. It is the paper itself, pressed into relief without ink: imagine light raking across the real sheet, and the white becomes a texture, not a colour.
