A visit to a shrine, from the series "Twelve Scenes of Popular Customs (Fuzoku juni tsui)"

A Visit to a Shrine, from the series Twelve Scenes of Popular Customs (Fuzoku juni tsui), is a 1781 design by Torii Kiyonaga that belongs to the moment when the artist consolidated his command of the Edo bijin-ga genre. The Fuzoku juni tsui set surveyed twelve aspects of fashionable behavior — temple visits, river outings, household scenes — using the conventions of the comparative or paired (tsui) print to gather a visual encyclopedia of contemporary manners. In this sheet a small group of women approaches a shrine precinct, their kimono patterns and arranged hairstyles described with the controlled precision that distinguished Kiyonaga's drawing from that of his rivals. By 1781 Kiyonaga, head of the Torii school after his master Torii Kiyomitsu, had largely shifted the lineage away from its traditional kabuki signboard work and toward the depiction of stylish townswomen, a reorientation that would make him the dominant designer of bijin-ga in Edo for the next decade. The print also illustrates his preference for situating beauties within fully realized settings — gateways, lanterns, paths — rather than against blank backgrounds, an approach that lent his women a quiet civic gravity. The Art Institute of Chicago records this impression as part of its substantial corpus of Kiyonaga's customs prints, where it functions as a key example of his early-1780s synthesis of figural elegance and observed setting.