Taking a Walk on New Year's Day

Taking a Walk on New Year's Day, dated to the mid-eighteenth century, presents an auspicious seasonal subject in which figures stroll out on the first day of the year, the occasion celebrated across Tokugawa society through formal visits and the wearing of fresh garments. 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 strolling figures with the refined, slightly slender proportions and delicate facial features that distinguish his hand from the muscular hyotan-ashi manner of his Torii predecessors, the line less violent than for aragoto roles and oriented instead toward the elegant ornamental rhythm of the bijin tradition. Patterned New Year robes and selected accessories supply the principal visual interest against the lightly inked ground, with seasonal cues such as bamboo, pine, or distant temple gates establishing the celebratory setting through reduced topographical reference. The hatsuhinode and hatsumode rituals of the first three days had become subjects of regular ukiyo-e treatment by the mid-eighteenth century, and Kiyomitsu's print belongs to the broader Torii engagement with seasonal genre alongside the workshop's continuing yakusha-e production. The Art Institute of Chicago preserves this impression (source_url https://www.artic.edu/artworks/19845) as a representative document of how the third-generation Torii head extended the school's range into auspicious seasonal genre in the polished benizuri-e idiom.