Admiring the wisteria at the Kameido Shrine

Admiring the Wisteria at the Kameido Shrine, a Torii Kiyonaga print held by the Art Institute of Chicago and dated to about 1781, draws on one of Edo's seasonal pilgrimages. The Kameido Tenjin shrine, sacred to the scholar-deity Sugawara no Michizane, was celebrated for the wisteria trellises that bloomed over its arched bridges and pond every late spring. Kiyonaga places a group of women beneath the cascading flowers, their summer robes patterned with motifs that complement the violet of the wisteria. The composition is divided horizontally by the rail of the famous taikobashi bridge and vertically by the slender uprights of the trellis, framing the figures and giving the gathering the stately balance characteristic of his Edo bijin-ga. As head of the Torii school, Kiyonaga had by 1781 brought the workshop's sense of grand staging - originally developed for kabuki signboards - to bear on outdoor scenes of Edo leisure, treating each public site as a kind of seasonal theater. The printers' use of overprinted color to render the wisteria's bunches gives the petals a soft material weight without disturbing the broader chromatic restraint. Catalogued at the Art Institute of Chicago, the sheet shows how the Torii school's most prominent designer turned a city's calendar of bloom and prayer into images that joined topographical pride with the elegantly proportioned beauties for which his Edo bijin-ga remained famous.