The Priest Kobo Daishi at the Tama River in Kii Province from the series The Six Tama Rivers

This woodblock print by Torii Kiyomasu II shows the priest Kobo Daishi (Kukai, 774-835), founder of the Shingon school of Japanese Buddhism, at the Tama River in Kii Province - one of the six rivers traditionally named 'Tama-gawa' across the Japanese archipelago and a recurring subject of classical and Edo poetry. The series The Six Tama Rivers (Mu Tama-gawa) is one of the staple groupings of Japanese poetic and pictorial culture, organising the six distinct rivers each called Tama (in Musashi, Settsu, Yamashiro, Yamato, Mutsu, and Kii provinces) into a thematic unit that designers across the centuries treated as a set. The Kii-province Tama-gawa was associated specifically with Kobo Daishi, who according to legend had purified himself in its waters during his pilgrimage to the sacred mountain Koya, where he later founded the Kongobu-ji monastery that remains the headquarters of Shingon Buddhism. Kiyomasu II depicts the saint at the river's edge, an unusual pictorial subject for a designer best known for kabuki actor prints but consistent with the broader range of Torii-school production beyond its core specialism in theatrical publicity. The Art Institute of Chicago dates the print to circa 1725-1735, a period in the heart of Kiyomasu II's mature career and well after the death of his predecessor Kiyomasu I, making the attribution to Kiyomasu II rather than to the elder Kiyomasu securely warranted. The medium - woodblock print in black ink and watercolour on cream Japanese paper - represents the transitional moment between earlier sumizuri-e (monochrome) and tan-e (hand-coloured orange) techniques and the more elaborate urushi-e and benizuri-e styles that would follow in the next decades.