A mortal woman with a heavenly ride. A slender beauty soars through the sky on the back of a hōō, the phoenix of East Asian myth — the auspicious bird said to appear only in times of peace and virtuous rule, herald of good fortune and emblem of the empress. It's almost certainly a mitate: Harunobu taking a graceful contemporary woman and casting her, with a wink, as a celestial immortal, borrowing the old imagery of Daoist sages who ascend to the heavens on the backs of phoenixes and cranes. The everyday and the divine, elegantly collapsed into one image.

The date is the quietly historic part. By 1766 Suzuki Harunobu had just helped pioneer the full-colour nishiki-e — the "brocade print," the technical leap that gave ukiyo-e its full palette and made everything that followed possible. His dreamy, doll-like, poetic beauties defined that very first generation of colour printing. So this floating woman on her phoenix isn't just charming; she's from the dawn of the medium, when printed colour itself still felt like a small miracle.

Inspired by the Chinese immortal from the Zhou dynasty - Prince Wang Qiao - this is Hōō ni notte sorawotobu on'na (鳳凰に乗って空を飛ぶ女, A woman flying through the sky on a phoenix) 1766.