Travelers at Enoshima, center sheet of a triptych

Travelers at Enoshima, the centre sheet of a triptych by Kitagawa Utamaro, is preserved at the Harvard Art Museums. Enoshima, the small pilgrimage island off the coast of Sagami, was a favoured destination for Edo travellers, who visited its shrines to the goddess Benzaiten and its sea-cave grottoes as part of seasonal religious and recreational outings. The triptych format, made by joining three vertical sheets into a single horizontal panorama, allowed Utamaro to develop a broader landscape stage on which to deploy his Edo bijin-ga figures. The centre sheet typically carried the compositional anchor - either a key grouping of travellers or a central architectural or landscape motif - around which the wings of the triptych could be balanced. Here a group of women and their companions is shown on the road to or from the island, dressed in summer or autumn travel garments and engaged with one another in the manner of leisured pilgrims. Utamaro's draftsmanship lends them his characteristic elongated proportions, and patterned robes are rendered with attentive colour separation. As preserved at Harvard, the sheet contributes both to the artist's body of triptych compositions and to the wider ukiyo-e tradition of pilgrimage and travel imagery that would flourish in the early nineteenth century with the landscape prints of Hokusai and Hiroshige.