Viewing Cherry Blossoms at Ueno

The right sheet of an oban triptych at the Art Institute of Chicago, this color woodblock print depicts the Edo hanami tradition of cherry-blossom viewing at Ueno Hill, one of the city's premier sites for spring outings. The temple complex of Kan'eiji at Ueno had been planted with cherry trees in the seventeenth century specifically to draw the urban population, and by Shuncho's time the spring festival was a major event in the Edo calendar. The work is one of his most explicitly Kiyonaga-influenced compositions: a horizontal procession of tall, statuesque women in seasonal kimono moves across the picture plane against a panoramic landscape of blossoming trees. The oban triptych format, with its three sheets joining into a single wide composition, was the signature Tenmei-era vehicle for such fashionable promenades, and Shuncho's mastery of the format is one of the principal reasons his work has been historically conflated with that of Torii Kiyonaga.