Chrysanthemum Festival, from the series "Elegant Five-needled Pine (Furyu goyo matsu)"

An [oban](/glossary/oban) polychrome woodblock print by Torii Kiyomine from the series Elegant Five-needled Pine (Furyu goyo matsu), datable to the early 1820s and depicting the Chrysanthemum Festival (Choyo no sekku) - the annual ninth-day-of-the-ninth-lunar-month observance traditionally marked in East Asian cultural calendars by the appreciation of late-blooming chrysanthemums and by the drinking of chrysanthemum-infused sake for longevity. The festival was one of the five seasonal festivals (gosekku) that structured the official Tokugawa calendar, and its associations with chrysanthemums - the imperial flower of Japan and the symbol of the Choyo no sekku - made it a recurring subject of [bijin-ga](/glossary/bijin-ga) depicting fashionable Edo women observing the day. The series title 'Elegant Five-needled Pine' (Furyu goyo matsu) draws on the auspicious symbolism of the goyo-matsu, the five-needled white pine associated with longevity and good fortune across Japanese seasonal iconography. The print's date range (1820 to 1825 by the Art Institute of Chicago) places it after Kiyomine's 1815 succession to the headship of the Torii school as Kiyomitsu II - and although it is catalogued under the Kiyomine name, in this attribution-flagged sense the work likely carries one of his late Kiyomine or early Kiyomitsu II signatures. Held by the Art Institute of Chicago (accession 1939.2130), Clarence Buckingham Collection.