The New Year's Festival, from the series "Precious Children's Games of the Five Festivals (Kodakara gosetsu asobi)"
- Date:
- c. 1801
- Medium:
- Color woodblock print; oban
- Source:
- Art Institute of Chicago
Designed in 1796, this Torii Kiyonaga print is part of the artist's series "Precious Children's Games of the Five Festivals (Kodakara gosetsu asobi)," devoted to scenes of children and the women who attend them at each of the five seasonal festivals. The New Year's Festival sheet captures the most important of these festivals, observed at the start of the lunar year with elaborate decorations, special dishes, and games. Kiyonaga, as head of the Torii school, applies to the New Year scene the same compositional vocabulary that defined his earlier Edo bijin-ga: tall, slender figures, calm oval faces, layered kimono with patterns suited to the festival, and a balanced grouping across the sheet. The presence of children and the festival's specific accessories shift the iconography away from the dense Yoshiwara compositions of the early 1780s toward the family-centered subjects of his late career. The Art Institute of Chicago holds this print, where it joins the other sheets of the Kodakara gosetsu asobi to form a coordinated set. Together they document not only the visual conventions of late-eighteenth-century Edo bijin-ga but also the seasonal calendar of the Edo townsman household, in which the New Year occupied a position of special social and ritual importance and provided the framework within which children's lives were structured.
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
The New Year's Festival, from the series "Precious Children's Games of the Five Festivals (Kodakara gosetsu asobi)" was created by Torii Kiyonaga (鳥居清長) in c. 1801.
The New Year's Festival, from the series "Precious Children's Games of the Five Festivals (Kodakara gosetsu asobi)" depicts children.
