No. 8, Taue, from the series Twelve Seasons of Agriculture (Kôsaku jûni setsu)

Sheet eight in Kitao Masanobu's Twelve Seasons of Agriculture (Kōsaku jūni setsu) depicts taue, the early-summer rice transplanting, when seedlings were moved out of the nursery beds and set in straight rows in the flooded paddies. The print is held by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Like the rest of the series, it stands apart from the Edo [bijin-ga](/glossary/bijin-ga) and Yoshiwara portraits for which Masanobu — also working in parallel as the writer Santō Kyōden — is more famous, and yet the line and the figural drawing are continuous with that better-known body of work. Here the rice-transplanters bend in a row across the lower register; their straw rain hats catch the eye against the flat sheen of the flooded field. The composition leaves a generous expanse of paddy and sky empty, in the late-Tenmei way that found expressive power in pictorial restraint rather than in crowded detail. The series as a whole reflects the educated Edo townsman's interest in the agricultural calendar as both a moral and an economic foundation, and individual prints like this one functioned as a kind of polite urban window onto the rural year, designed for buyers who would never have stood in a paddy themselves.