from the series Sannô Festival (Sannô Gosairei)

This sheet from Kitao Masanobu's series on Edo's Sannō Festival (Sannō Gosairei) depicts one of the festival's costumed dancers or float-attendants, drawn in the calm, oval-faced [bijin-ga](/glossary/bijin-ga) manner that Masanobu had developed under his teacher Kitao Shigemasa and refined in his own Yoshiwara portraits. Sannō Gosairei, alongside the Kanda festival, was one of Edo's two great triennial parades through the streets toward the shogun's castle, and the elaborate themed floats — drawing on Noh, Kabuki, and classical mythology — were standard subject matter for Edo print designers in the An'ei-Tenmei years. Masanobu was best known as the bijin-ga designer of the Yoshiwara, but under his other name, Santō Kyōden, he was also one of Edo's leading popular writers, with a sharp sense for the city's public culture. The festival prints translate his familiar facial type and robe-drawing into a more theatrical register, with the costumed performer occupying most of the picture plane against an essentially empty paper ground. Now in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the sheet is a relatively quiet example of Masanobu's work outside the licensed quarter, and a reminder that the bijin-ga vocabulary of the time was deployed across a wider range of urban subjects than the courtesan portrait alone.