A Young Nobleman, His Mother, and Three Servents, from the series "A Brocade of Eastern Manners (Fuzoku Azuma no nishiki)"

A Young Nobleman, His Mother, and Three Servants, from the series A Brocade of Eastern Manners (Fuzoku Azuma no nishiki), is a 1778 woodblock print by Torii Kiyonaga, the Torii school master who reshaped Edo bijin-ga in the late eighteenth century. While the series is best known for its surveys of female fashion and ceremony, individual sheets such as this one extend the project to family groupings in which a male figure - here a young nobleman, dressed in the formal robes appropriate to his station - is paired with his mother and a small staff of servants. Kiyonaga arranges the five figures with the careful spacing that characterizes his mature compositions, scaling the bodies in proportion to age and rank, and using costume to map the social architecture of the household. The mother's kimono and the young man's hakama mark them out from the simpler clothing of the three servants, and Kiyonaga's restrained but assured use of nishiki-e color reinforces the distinctions. Although the Torii school had built its reputation on theatrical signboards, Kiyonaga's adaptation of that legacy to domestic genre scenes broadened the school's visual reach without abandoning its commitment to clear, decisive line. The print is preserved at the Art Institute of Chicago, whose impressions from Fuzoku Azuma no nishiki document the series's coverage of Edo social types. It illustrates how the artist used the standing-group format to make the household, no less than the pleasure quarter, a worthy subject for the eastern brocade of print.