Miyanoshita, from the series "Seven Famous Hot Springs of Hakone (Hakone shichito meisho)"

Miyanoshita, from the series Seven Famous Hot Springs of Hakone (Hakone shichito meisho), is a 1775 Torii Kiyonaga design that joins the Edo bijin-ga tradition to the popular meisho (famous places) genre. The Hakone hot-spring district lay along the Tokaido at the foot of the mountains southwest of Edo, and its seven historic onsen — Yumoto, Tonosawa, Miyanoshita, Dogashima, Sokokura, Kiga, and Ashinoyu — formed a celebrated travel circuit for townspeople and samurai. Kiyonaga's Miyanoshita sheet pairs fashionable women with the village's distinctive bath buildings and mountain setting, using the female figures as the pictorial focus while the meisho subject provides the topographical frame. At 1775, Kiyonaga's figural style still carries the slighter proportions inherited from Harunobu and Shigemasa, but the series itself signals his interest in extending the Torii school's range beyond its kabuki-signboard core toward illustrated travel and customs subjects. Within his career the Hakone shichito meisho is a key early multi-sheet project, looking ahead to the larger Edo meisho and Yoshiwara surveys he would design at the height of the early 1780s. The Art Institute of Chicago records this impression among its early Kiyonaga holdings, where it documents the artist's first sustained engagement with the meisho-bijin hybrid.