Evening Bell at the Kannon Temple in Asakusa (Asakusa Kannon no banshô), from the series Eight Views of the Festivals of Various Deities in Great Edo (Oedo shojin gosairei hakkei)

This sheet is the evening-bell print in Kitao Masanobu's series Eight Views of the Festivals of Various Deities in Great Edo (Ōedo shojin gosairei hakkei), in which the classical Eight Views grouping inherited from Chinese painting is re-anchored to specific Edo shrines and temples and their festival days. Here the bell is that of Asakusa Kannon, the great temple in the north of the city whose precincts were one of the busiest popular pilgrimage sites in Japan. Masanobu — who under his pen name Santō Kyōden was also one of Edo's leading writers of kibyōshi and sharebon — treats the scene as both Hakkei and topographical record: the temple roofs and bell tower are drawn with restraint, the figures of pilgrims are scaled small against the architecture, and the muted tonal range fixes the time as late afternoon, just before the lighting of lanterns. The series as a whole flatters Edo's emerging sense of itself as a city whose religious and seasonal calendar rivaled the classical literary topographies of China. Now in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the print stands as a quiet, well-composed example of Masanobu's work outside the Edo [bijin-ga](/glossary/bijin-ga) and Yoshiwara portraiture for which he is more famous.