Viewing Cherry Blossoms at Goten Hill
- Date:
- c. 1787
- Medium:
- Color woodblock print; right sheet of oban triptych (left sheet: 1939.2195, keyblock proof impression: 1925.3090)
- Source:
- Art Institute of Chicago
Viewing Cherry Blossoms at Goten Hill, held by the Art Institute of Chicago, is Chobunsai Eishi's contribution to a longstanding Edo print subject: hanami at Goten-yama, the cherry-blossom hill in Shinagawa to the south of the city. Goten-yama had been planted with cherry trees during the Genroku era and remained one of Edo's most visited blossom-viewing spots in the late eighteenth century. The hill's site overlooking Edo Bay offered both flowers and a panoramic view, and printmakers regularly composed groups of fashionable beauties picnicking, walking, or pausing beneath the trees. Eishi's design participates in this genre while preserving the slender, attenuated figures that distinguished his Edo [bijin-ga](/glossary/bijin-ga) from rougher street-style hanami images. His figures are arranged along the hill's slope or among the trees, robes shifted for the warmer season, with parasols, picnic boxes, and other hanami accessories possibly distributed among them. As a Kano-trained [ukiyo-e](/glossary/ukiyo-e) artist, Eishi had a long apprenticeship in pictorial conventions for cherry-blossom scenery, and he brought that vocabulary directly into his print designs: the blossoms are integrated into the composition rather than scattered ornamentally, and the human figures hold their poised verticality even against the more diffuse mass of flowering branches. The Art Institute of Chicago's impression dates the print to the late eighteenth century. Goten-yama would lose its cherry trees in the mid-nineteenth century when the bakufu cut them down to build coastal batteries against Western shipping, lending Eishi's image an additional documentary value about the site's earlier character.
c. 1790
Color woodblock print; oban
c. 1789/95
Color woodblock print; right sheet of oban triptych
c. 1791/92
Color woodblock print; chuban
c. 1793
Color woodblock print; oban
Viewing Cherry Blossoms at Goten Hill was created by Chōbunsai Eishi (鳥文斎栄之) in c. 1787.
Viewing Cherry Blossoms at Goten Hill depicts spring.
