People enjoying fireworks from boats at Ryogoku Bridge

People Enjoying Fireworks from Boats at Ryogoku Bridge, an undated sheet in the Victoria and Albert Museum's catalog, depicts the most famous summer entertainment of Edo: the fireworks displays staged on the Sumida River below the Ryogoku Bridge during the kawabiraki opening of the river season in the fifth lunar month. The festival had been celebrated annually since the eighteenth century, and the boats hired by townspeople, samurai, and the leading courtesans of the Yoshiwara crowded the river in the hours before the rockets were launched. The bridge itself became a vantage point for spectators too poor to hire a boat. Kikukawa Eizan stages the scene as a multi-figure tableau in which fashionable beauties dominate the foreground of the boats. The fireworks themselves are printed in the upper register as bursts of light against the night sky, with their reflections in the river giving the design its tonal organization. Although Eizan worked primarily within the Edo [bijin-ga](/glossary/bijin-ga) tradition rather than the landscape genre, his fireworks design adapts the bijin-ga to a citywide spectacle. The Kikukawa school had long incorporated festival and seasonal subjects into its core practice, and the Ryogoku fireworks were one of the most reliably commercial subjects available to a publisher. The Victoria and Albert Museum's catalog record may be consulted at https://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O69300.