Fire for the Bon Festival

The print refers to Kyoto's Gozan no Okuribi, the chain of mountainside bonfires lit each August 16 to send ancestral spirits back to the other world, and most likely depicts the great character dai (大) blazing on the slope of Mount Nyoigatake above the city. Compositions of this subject typically anchor a dark mountain silhouette beneath a deep indigo or sumi-black sky, with the burning kanji rendered in thin horizontal strokes of saturated orange and yellow, sometimes reflected in the rooftops and rivers below. The dominance of solid dark fields would have called for repeated baren impressions to achieve flat, opaque planes of pigment on the washi, while the fire itself often receives a bokashi blur from red into yellow at the edges of the strokes. Bon festival scenes are uncommon in Ito's output, which more often favored quiet daytime temple views, and this nocturnal subject sits within a smaller seasonal-festival strand alongside the cherry blossom and snow compositions that punctuate his Kyoto cycle.