Young Man Playing Football, a Harunobu Pillar Print

A tall, narrow print by the man who made the first full-colour woodblocks.

Work: colour woodblock pillar print
Maker: Suzuki Harunobu
Date: late 1760s
Era: The Victorian game · 1870–1900
Source: Cleveland Museum of Art · via its open access collection

A football game, one pillar tall.

Format

The full-resolution scan, colour-managed to the source — yours to print, study, and explore.

Size

$29.00

The story

A colour woodblock print by Suzuki Harunobu from the late 1760s, a sheet 69.8 centimetres tall and only 12.5 wide, the narrow format made to hang on a pillar. Its title is Young Man Playing Football, and the game is kemari, the court football in which the ball is kept in the air without hands. Harunobu was the first artist to produce full-colour prints, nishiki-e, in 1765, which made the older two- and three-colour prints obsolete, and he died in 1770, so this is from the last years of a short career. The Cleveland Museum of Art has released it under CC0. The format is tall, so the house offers the sizes its proportions allow.

See it on your wall

The piece, in the room it was made for

Young Man Playing Football, a Harunobu Pillar Print, printed large and framed — in the den, the club bar, the supporters’ bar. Every edition ships ready to become the piece the room is built around.

Young Man Playing Football, a Harunobu Pillar Print framed on the wall

About this reproduction

A reproduction of colour woodblock pillar print — Suzuki Harunobu, late 1760s — from the copy held by Cleveland Museum of Art · via its open access collection. The source. The work was published before 1931 and is public-domain verified.
Printed faithful to that source scan — restore honestly, disclose always. We do not re-colour it, complete it, or interpret it; the piece you receive is the image as it survives, halftone grain honored as history, not damage.
Printed to order on museum-grade cotton-rag stock with pigment inks — the pairing is rated 100+ years.
Colour-managed to the source; the tone of the paper and the ink is the period’s, not ours.
Ships in 5–10 business days, rolled in a heavy-wall tube (framed editions ship flat-packed).
If it arrives less than perfect, we reprint or refund — your choice.

Why our pieces cost more than a poster: a poster is a mass run on wood-pulp stock, colour-corrected to whatever flattered the press that day. This is one sheet, pulled for you, at a size where the maker’s hand is visible — the linework, the halftone grain, the lettering — on materials made to outlast their owner.

From the same collection