Empress Jito (Jito Tenno) from the series

Empress Jitō (645–703) appears as the second poet in the Hyakunin Isshu anthology, the collection of one hundred classical tanka poems compiled by Fujiwara no Teika in the thirteenth century. Her poem, beginning "Haru sugite / natsu ki ni kerashi" (Spring has passed / and summer seems to have arrived), evokes the whiteness of bleaching cloth on the hills of Yoshino as a sign of the season's change. Hokusai's illustration, likely from his late series of designs for the Hyakunin Isshu, would have translated the poem into a composed landscape rather than a portrait, evoking hills, textile workers at a bleaching ground, or the residual white of snow. The series, begun in Hokusai's final years but left incomplete at his death, employs simplified landscape forms and broad areas of flat color, departing from earlier bijin-ga conventions that had dominated poem-illustration print traditions.