Sparklers on Summer Evening

Held in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Sparklers on Summer Evening is a hanging scroll painted in ink, color, and gold on silk that exemplifies Shiokawa Bunrin's mid-career mastery of the Shijō atmospheric mode. The work belongs to the tradition of summer-evening genre painting that Kyoto Shijō painters developed from the school's plein-air sketching practice, in which figures engaged in seasonal pastimes are situated within an atmospheric setting carried by tonal washes rather than by descriptive line. The subject of sparklers, the hand-held fireworks (senkō hanabi) that produced a brief shower of glittering sparks before extinguishing, was a quintessentially Japanese summer pleasure associated with Bon festival evenings and the cooling hours of summer dusk.