A Young Woman Watching Frogs (parody of Ono no Tôfû)

A Young Woman Watching Frogs (parody of Ono no Tofu), dated 1755, applies the mitate parody format to the celebrated legend of Ono no Tofu (Ono no Michikaze), the tenth-century calligrapher who, despondent over his slow progress in the art of writing, watched a frog repeatedly attempt to leap onto a willow branch until it finally succeeded, the persistence inspiring him to renew his own studies and become one of the Three Brushes of Japanese calligraphy. The mitate genre invited ukiyo-e designers to substitute a contemporary figure, typically a beautiful young woman, for a famous historical or legendary subject, with the parody legible through selected attributes that cued the original referent without forcing the contemporary figure to wear period dress. Torii Kiyomitsu I, third head of the Torii school after Kiyonobu I and Kiyomasu I, here works in the polished benizuri-e mode that defined the school's mid-eighteenth-century output, a two- or three-color printing technique in which delicately registered pink and green pigments were laid over a precisely cut sumi outline. The benizuri-e process represented an intermediate stage between the earlier hand-colored tan-e and beni-e sheets of the founding Torii generation and the full-color nishiki-e revolution of the 1760s, and Kiyomitsu was the leading designer of the format during its peak years. Kiyomitsu draws the standing young woman with the refined, slightly slender proportions and delicate facial features characteristic of his polished bijin idiom, with the willow branch and the leaping frog distributed across the composition as legible cues to the Ono no Tofu narrative. Patterned robe motifs supply the principal visual interest, and the hosoban format concentrates attention on the long ornamental vertical of the figure. The Art Institute of Chicago preserves this impression (source_url https://www.artic.edu/artworks/6819) as a representative document of Kiyomitsu's mid-1750s mitate practice in the polished benizuri-e idiom.