The Fireworks (Summer)

The Fireworks (Summer) is the summer print in Hasegawa Konobu IV's seasonal genre series for the Uchida printers of Kyoto, a companion piece to the larger Children and Fireworks composition and part of a coherent four-print cycle organizing the Japanese year around children's seasonal play. The composition presents the iconic summer hanabi scene as a quiet domestic vignette: a small group of children gather to watch the bursting fireworks above them, the night sky rendered in deep indigo and the fireworks themselves in radiating accents of red, gold, and white. Konobu IV's color register stays warm against the cool night, emphasizing the children's bright patterned summer yukata and the small lanterns of the gathering. The print is published by Uchida and follows the company's postwar production model of issuing modest-format color woodblock prints for a domestic audience that valued the modern continuation of the traditional Japanese print medium. Documented through the Japanese Art Open Database from the Robert O. Muller research files, the impression preserves the saturated polychrome inks and the slightly larger-than-chuban dimensions characteristic of Konobu IV's Uchida seasonal series.