The Fourth Month (Shigatsu), from an untitled series of twelve months

This Art Institute of Chicago color woodblock print in half hosoban format and benizuri-e classification, dated to around 1750, is the Fourth Month from an untitled series of twelve months. The Twelve Months series, called Junikagetsu, was one of the most enduring iconographic structures in ukiyo-e, organizing seasonal genre scenes into a calendrical sequence that gave collectors a year-long visual cycle to assemble and contemplate. Ishikawa Toyonobu's Fourth Month, corresponding roughly to early summer in the lunar calendar, would have been linked iconographically to the symbols of the season: cherry blossoms past their peak, irises beginning to bloom, the lifting of cool spring layers from summer-weight kimono. The half hosoban, an unusually narrow format that splits the already-slender hosoban in half lengthwise, forced Toyonobu into an extreme vertical compression that resembles the hashira-e in its proportional demands. Benizuri-e classification confirms the use of two or three printed color blocks supplying rose pink and grass green over the black-line printing. The Art Institute sheet is an important document of mid-Edo calendrical iconography and of Toyonobu's experimentation with extreme narrow formats in the benizuri-e mode.