Chrysanthemum festival, from the series "Precious Children's Games of the Five Festivals (Kodakara gosetsu asobi)"

Chrysanthemum Festival, from the series Precious Children's Games of the Five Festivals (Kodakara gosetsu asobi), is a Torii Kiyonaga print in the Art Institute of Chicago, dated 1796 and produced in the artist's last decade of printmaking activity. The Five Festivals (gosekku) marked the annual rhythm of Edo life, and the ninth-month Choyo or Chrysanthemum Festival was associated with longevity, chrysanthemum-petal sake, and refined garden gatherings. Kiyonaga, head of the Torii school but by the mid-1790s less active in print production as he devoted himself to school administration and kabuki billboards, here returns to a favored Edo bijin-ga mode in which women and children of the merchant class enact seasonal customs. Tall mothers and elder sisters in restrained Kansei-era robes attend the children's amusements, with potted chrysanthemums and seasonal accessories specifying the festival. The figures retain the elongated proportions Kiyonaga established in the 1780s, although the design reflects a more domestic and quietly observed mood, in keeping with the moralizing tone encouraged under the Kansei Reforms of Matsudaira Sadanobu. The Kodakara gosetsu asobi series, by uniting the calendar of festivals with imagery of well-bred children and their attendants, contributed to the late-eighteenth-century interest in family genre subjects that would influence subsequent Edo bijin-ga artists. The print at the Art Institute of Chicago is a key document of Kiyonaga's mature engagement with that domestic vein of the Torii school's output.