Visiting Kiyomizu Temple

Dated circa 1684 to 1698 and held in the Art Institute of Chicago, Visiting Kiyomizu Temple is a hand-colored o-[oban](/glossary/oban) tan-e print that documents one of the great pilgrimage sites of Kyoto as a subject for popular [ukiyo-e](/glossary/ukiyo-e) treatment. Kiyomizu-dera, the eighth-century Buddhist temple perched on its dramatic wooden veranda over the Otowa valley in the Higashiyama district of Kyoto, was one of the most frequently visited religious and tourist destinations in early modern Japan, and prints depicting the temple's distinctive architecture and its throngs of pilgrims circulated widely as both devotional aids and souvenirs. Sugimura's composition organizes a group of visiting figures within the temple precinct, with architectural elements of the great hall and its surrounding veranda providing the spatial frame. Printed in single-block black ink and subsequently hand-colored using tan, the orange-red lead pigment that gives the tan-e category its name, the work demonstrates the Edo print industry's standard early polychrome mode before the development of multi-block printing. The large o-oban format allowed Sugimura to handle architectural detail and figural complexity at substantial scale. As one of his rare [meisho-e](/glossary/meisho-e) (famous-place picture) compositions, the work shows him extending the geographic range of his subject matter beyond the Edo Yoshiwara into the cultural geography of the Kansai region.