An outing at Hagidera, from the series "A Brocade of Eastern Manners (Fuzoku Azuma no nishiki)"

An Outing at Hagidera, from the series A Brocade of Eastern Manners (Fuzoku Azuma no nishiki), is a 1778 woodblock print by Torii Kiyonaga, the Torii school master whose work defined Edo bijin-ga in the late 1770s and 1780s. Hagidera, the bush-clover temple, is a sobriquet for Ryugan-ji and similar Edo temples whose gardens were celebrated for their early-autumn blooms of hagi. Visitors crowded such precincts during the brief flowering, making them a favored destination for the seasonal outings that Kiyonaga's Fuzoku Azuma no nishiki repeatedly chronicles. The print follows a group of fashionable women, perhaps with attending servants, as they walk through the temple grounds, their kimono shifting toward autumn colors and patterns appropriate to the moment. The composition shows Kiyonaga's developing sense of how to arrange multi-figure groups in a coherent shallow space, the figures spaced and overlapped in a way that suggests the slow progress of an actual stroll. His Torii school inheritance is visible in the confident outlines and in the comfortable scale at which the bodies sit on the page. The restrained nishiki-e palette - greens, autumn reds, browns - registers the season without saturating it. The print is preserved at the Art Institute of Chicago, whose impressions of Fuzoku Azuma no nishiki document Kiyonaga's coverage of Edo's seasonal life. It exemplifies how Edo bijin-ga used the temple garden as a stage for the carefully observed manners of the city.