Dog (Inu), from the series "Fashionable Twelve Signs of the Zodiac (Furyu juni shi)"

Dog (Inu), from the series Fashionable Twelve Signs of the Zodiac (Furyu juni shi), is a 1777 woodblock print by Torii Kiyonaga, the leading Torii school designer of Edo bijin-ga in the late eighteenth century. The series belongs to the popular mitate or analogue genre, in which the twelve animals of the East Asian zodiac are not depicted directly but rather suggested through scenes of contemporary beauties whose situations or attributes evoke each sign. For Inu, Kiyonaga assembles his fashionable women and accompanying figures around a motif that points obliquely to the Dog, leaving the viewer to discover the connection between zodiac and image. The print exhibits the qualities for which Kiyonaga is most admired: tall, statuesque figures arranged in measured spatial relationships, kimono patterns printed with crisp keyblock outlines and graded color blocks, and an overall tonal balance that uses sparing pinks, blues, and ochres to anchor the composition. As the fourth head of the Torii school, Kiyonaga inherited the lineage's responsibility for kabuki signboards but increasingly directed his published output toward bijin-ga, where he established the proportional canon that became standard for Edo beauty prints in the 1780s. The Art Institute of Chicago holds this impression and documents the series within its broader holding of Kiyonaga zodiac and calendar prints. The image illustrates the period taste for refined visual wit, in which courtesans and townswomen could stand as elegant surrogates for the inherited Sino-Japanese cycle of years.