The Elopement

An oban benizuri-e by Torii Kiyohiro of around 1750 depicting an elopement scene - a recurring theme of mid-eighteenth-century Edo ukiyo-e drawn from the world of urban romance and the shinju (lovers' suicide) dramatic tradition that had dominated the Edo theatrical stage since the early plays of Chikamatsu Monzaemon. The elopement of a young man and a young woman, typically across an urban street or along a riverside path under cover of darkness, was a stock conceit of Edo print and stage culture: it carried the romantic charge of forbidden love combined with the social-realist register of merchant-class family conflict, against which the lovers' flight was set. The oban sheet (approximately 38 by 26 cm) gave Kiyohiro room for a more developed two-figure composition than his usual hosoban format allowed, while the registered pink and green of the benizuri-e palette places the print in the period before the introduction of full-colour nishiki-e around 1765. Kiyohiro, working as a designer of the Torii school under the headship of Torii Kiyomitsu and his contemporaries, produced prints across the full Edo subject range in addition to his core specialism in yakusha-e. Held at the Art Institute of Chicago as part of the Buckingham Collection of Japanese woodblock prints.