The First Evening in the Mountains (Yamabiraki no yûhi)

A late-eighteenth-century Katsukawa Shuncho composition held by the Art Institute of Chicago, this color woodblock print depicts the festival of yamabiraki, the ceremonial opening of mountain pilgrimage routes for the summer season. The title refers to the first evening of the mountain opening, a celebratory moment in the Edo calendar when small artificial hills were constructed within the city itself, particularly at sites like Fujizuka mounds dedicated to Mount Fuji worship. Shuncho's treatment, characteristic of his Tenmei-era bijin-ga, presents the festival not through landscape but through the elegantly dressed Edo women who attended such ceremonies in seasonal kimono. The print exemplifies his ability to use a calendar event as a frame for fashionable figure observation, integrating the sumptuary detail of obi knots and kimono pattern with a quiet sense of communal ritual. The composition reflects the influence of Torii Kiyonaga in its tall figures and calm spacing but retains the warmer palette and pattern-rich textile rendering that distinguishes Shuncho's individual hand within the Katsukawa school tradition.