Fûzoku Hanami Dori

Fûzoku Hanami Dori, a woodblock-printed book of the eighteenth century in the Art Institute of Chicago, is one of Nishikawa Suketada's contributions to the long Kyoto ehon tradition of cherry-blossom outing imagery. The title — 'Hanami Street: Customs and Manners' or similar — frames the book around the cultural practice of hanami, the springtime cherry-blossom viewing that was one of the central seasonal rituals of Kyoto urban life. Suketada's figures stroll, sit, gather under blooming trees, and engage in the social pleasures of the season, their costumes rendered with the careful attention to textile pattern that the Nishikawa workshop had always emphasized. The book extends the family interest in seasonal imagery as a frame for bijin depiction — an interest his father Sukenobu had pursued repeatedly across titles like Ehon tokiwagusa and Ehon hana momiji. The undated 18th-century museum cataloguing reflects the imprecision common to many Kamigata ehon of this period, where colophons may be missing or unclear. Stylistically the book is consistent with Suketada's mature work of the 1750s. The Art Institute's holding contributes to one of the strongest Western institutional records of the late Kyoto Nishikawa school.