Clearing Weather of the Hairpins (Kanzashi no seiran), from the series Eight Views of the Accessories of Palace Maids (Jôchû tedôgu hakkei)

Clearing Weather of the Hairpins (Kanzashi no seiran), from the series Eight Views of the Accessories of Palace Maids (Jochu tedogu hakkei), an undated Edo [ukiyo-e](/glossary/ukiyo-e) print by Kitao Masanobu documented through ukiyo-e.org from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, belongs to one of the most ingenious sub-genres of late-eighteenth-century Japanese woodblock design: the mitate, or parodic transposition, of the canonical Eight Views of the Xiao and Xiang Rivers from Song Chinese painting onto subjects drawn from contemporary urban life. The classical Eight Views, with their codified motifs of evening bell, returning sails, descending geese, and so on, had been domesticated into Japanese poetry and painting centuries earlier as the Eight Views of Omi and other localised cycles. Masanobu and his Kitao school colleagues took the conceit one step further, applying it to the everyday paraphernalia of the women of the shogunal palace, here the hairpins, kanzashi, whose clean linear silhouette is offered as a pictorial equivalent for the meteorological clarity of seiran, the mountain mist clearing to reveal a fresh view. The result is at once a piece of refined visual wit and an elegant document of late Edo material culture, the kind of object beloved of the kyoka circles in which Masanobu, soon to be known as Santo Kyoden, was an active participant. The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston preserves the documented impression.