Sugoroku Players

An oban benizuri-e by Torii Kiyohiro of around 1750, depicting figures playing sugoroku, the Japanese board game derived ultimately from the same Asian dice-and-board tradition that produced backgammon. Sugoroku in the Edo period existed in two main forms: the bansugoroku, a race-game in which counters were moved by dice along a track in the manner of backgammon, and the e-sugoroku, a pictorial track-game in which players moved through illustrated scenes on a printed sheet. Both forms were widely popular as parlour entertainments, with e-sugoroku boards sold cheaply by Edo printers and changed with the New Year as part of the seasonal market for popular print ephemera. Kiyohiro composes the scene on the larger oban sheet, which gave designers roughly twice the working surface of the hosoban actor-print format and allowed multi-figure genre compositions of this kind. The benizuri-e palette of pink and green over a black key block belongs to the mid-eighteenth century transitional period between hand-coloured urushi-e and the full-colour nishiki-e introduced around 1765. The print is held by the Art Institute of Chicago as part of the Clarence Buckingham Collection, one of the most important Western holdings of Torii-school benizuri-e and the principal institutional record of Kiyohiro's career.