The Bride Traveling in the Rain, from the series "The Foxes' Wedding"

Held in the Art Institute of Chicago and dated 1765, The Bride Traveling in the Rain is the central image from Minkō's small color-printed series Kitsune no yomeiri (狐の嫁入り, The Fox's Wedding), one of his earliest surviving productions and a charming early example of the chuban yoko-e horizontal small-sheet color print. The fox's wedding is a perennial subject of Japanese folklore: a sun-shower, the meteorological phenomenon of rain falling while the sun still shines, was traditionally explained by villagers as the wedding procession of a kitsune bride being escorted to her groom's house, the rain hiding the supernatural cortège from human eyes. Minkō's print depicts the bride herself, anthropomorphized as an elegant fox in human dress, traveling in the rain attended by a small retinue, with the falling rain rendered through diagonal hatching across the upper register. Measuring approximately 28 by 10 centimeters, the work was printed in color on the small horizontal sheet that suited intimate viewing and was commonly issued in linked series. The Fox's Wedding sequence was reportedly executed in collaboration with five other artists, probably Minkō's pupils, suggesting that by the mid-1760s the Tachibana studio had achieved sufficient organization to coordinate multi-artist print projects. As a representative of the brief flowering of chuban yoko-e color printing that paralleled Suzuki Harunobu's contemporary nishiki-e developments, the print sits at a fascinating moment in the chromatic evolution of mid-eighteenth-century Edo ukiyo-e. The Art Institute of Chicago example, donated by Mr. and Mrs. James A. Michener, helps document the early phase of Minkō's career before the publication of his masterwork.