Carrying a Lantern Decorated with the Flowers of the Four Seasons (Hirakawa-cho Yamamoto-cho shiki no hana mando) from the series "The Festival of the Sanno Shrine (Sanno go-sairei)"

This print from Torii Kiyonaga's series The Festival of the Sanno Shrine (Sanno go-sairei), recorded by the Art Institute of Chicago and dated around 1780, documents one of Edo's grandest civic processions. The Sanno festival, sponsored by the shogunate, moved decorated floats and entertainment troupes through the streets every other year, and Kiyonaga uses the series to record the contributions of specific neighborhoods. Here a lantern (mando) painted with the flowers of the four seasons is borne aloft by representatives of the Hirakawa-cho and Yamamoto-cho wards, the elaborate object becoming a portable garden hoisted above the heads of the participants. Kiyonaga, by 1780 the leading designer of the Torii school, was uniquely positioned to take on this kind of public commission because the family workshop had long supplied images of theater and festival to the city's printsellers. His compositional sense ties the verticality of the lantern to the upright figures of the bearers, generating the stately rhythm so often praised in Edo bijin-ga of the late 1770s and 1780s. Block printing in the period favored carefully measured color overlays for the painted flowers, while the figures' robes show the keen interest in fabric and pattern that ran through the artist's bijin-ga production. The Art Institute of Chicago's holdings of the Sanno series allow viewers to see how the Torii school turned a single municipal event into a sequence of memorable images, joining theater, fashion, and ward identity into one civic narrative.