Evening Snow at Kinryuzan Temple (Kinryuzan no bosetsu), from the series "Eight Fashionable Views of Edo (Furyu Edo hakkei)"
- Date:
- c. 1778
- Medium:
- Color woodblock print; half hosoban (right side)
- Source:
- Art Institute of Chicago
Evening Snow at Kinryūzan Temple (Kinryūzan no bosetsu), from the series Eight Fashionable Views of Edo (Fūryū Edo hakkei), is a color woodblock print designed by Torii Kiyonaga in 1773. The series takes the classical literary framework of the eight views of the Xiao and Xiang rivers and resets it among well-known sites of Edo, replacing remote Chinese landscapes with the city's own temples, rivers, and viewing places. Kinryūzan—the great Buddhist temple complex at Asakusa, more familiarly known as Sensō-ji—was already an essential landmark in mid-Edo urban culture, drawing pilgrims, sightseers, and the crowds of the Yoshiwara's eastern fringe. The Bosetsu (Evening Snow) variant of the eight views requires winter, twilight, and an air of stilled contemplation, which Kiyonaga supplies through softly falling snow over the temple's roofs and the figures of elegant women paused beneath it. As a young designer in the Torii school of woodblock artists, he treats the bijin not as accidental visitors but as participants in the classical mood, lending the place a literary aura familiar to educated Edo viewers. The Art Institute of Chicago, which holds this impression, dates the sheet to the early 1770s when Kiyonaga was synthesizing the lyric manner of Suzuki Harunobu with the more substantial figure type that would soon define his [bijin-ga](/glossary/bijin-ga). Color is cool and gentle, with greys, soft blues, and pale browns suggesting the muffled palette of a snowy evening. For modern viewers, the print exemplifies how Edo print culture incorporated its own city into the canon of literary landscapes.
c. 1782
Color woodblock print; chuban
c. 1787
Color woodblock print; center and right sheets of oban triptych
c. 1786
Color woodblock print; koban
c. 1787
Color woodblock print; oban triptych
Evening Snow at Kinryuzan Temple (Kinryuzan no bosetsu), from the series "Eight Fashionable Views of Edo (Furyu Edo hakkei)" was created by Torii Kiyonaga (鳥居清長) in c. 1778.
Evening Snow at Kinryuzan Temple (Kinryuzan no bosetsu), from the series "Eight Fashionable Views of Edo (Furyu Edo hakkei)" depicts winter.
