Kan'eiji Temple on Toeizan, from the series "Fashionable Eight Views of Edo (Furyu Edo hakkei)"

Also from "Fashionable Eight Views of Edo (Furyu Edo hakkei)," this Art Institute of Chicago oban locates a bijin-ga figure at Kan'eiji, the Tokugawa shogunal temple on Toeizan (now Ueno). Founded in 1625 as Edo's spiritual counterpart to Hieizan outside Kyoto, Kan'eiji was both an enormous religious complex and one of the city's most popular cherry-blossom destinations during hanami season. Eizan presents the site indirectly: rather than depicting the temple's halls, he places a fashionable young woman in a setting that an Edo viewer would have read as Kan'eiji's grounds through visual cues — cherry trees, a particular cluster of architecture in the distance, or seasonal dress. The Fashionable Eight Views convention assumed that the bijin and the place reciprocally illustrated one another. Within Eizan's oeuvre this series belongs to the productive Bunka-era stretch (c. early 1810s) when he was the most-published bijin-ga designer in Edo.