The Fourth Month (from the series Fashionable Monthly Visits to Temples in the Four Seasons)

The Fourth Month, from the series Fashionable Monthly Visits to Temples in the Four Seasons, is a Torii Kiyonaga print dated 1784 and held by the Art Institute of Chicago. The series binds twelve monthly designs to the religious and seasonal calendar of Edo by representing fashionable women on pilgrimages to particular shrines and temples appropriate to each month. The fourth month, kanagatsu in the lunar calendar, corresponds to early summer; it included the Kanbutsu-e Buddha-bathing rite at temples on the eighth day and the lush green of newly leafed trees and irises. Kiyonaga, fourth head of the Torii school, places his tall, broad-shouldered women along the approach to a temple precinct, their robes patterned to suggest the lighter unlined fabrics of the season. His calm contour lines and elongated proportions are now thoroughly settled into the Edo [bijin-ga](/glossary/bijin-ga) vocabulary, and the architectural background is given just enough specificity to identify the destination as a temple of the appropriate kind. The series joins the broader late-Tenmei interest in matching the activities of women to particular months and named locations—a structuring device that also informs other Kiyonaga projects of the same years and that would shape later bijin-ga by Utamaro and others. As a 1784 Art Institute of Chicago holding, the print exemplifies how the Torii school under Kiyonaga's direction integrated calendar, place, and figure into the refined polychrome printmaking that defined Edo bijin-ga at its height.