The Poet Sojo Henjo, from the series "Six Immortal Poets (Rokkasen)"

The Poet Sojo Henjo, from the series Six Immortal Poets (Rokkasen), shows Torii Kiyonaga adapting the classical canon of the Rokkasen — the six ninth-century waka poets canonized by Ki no Tsurayuki — to the visual language of late eighteenth-century Edo bijin-ga. Designed around 1780, the print presents the priest-poet Henjo not as a remote historical figure but as a contemporary subject contextualized through the fashionable women who frame him, a strategy of mitate (parody or analogical substitution) that allowed Kiyonaga and his Torii school colleagues to invest classical themes with the everyday vitality of Edo street life. By the late 1770s Kiyonaga had begun to assert the tall, dignified female type that would shortly define his mature style, and this Rokkasen series sits at the threshold of that development: the figures retain something of the slighter proportions inherited from Suzuki Harunobu and Kitao Shigemasa, but the compositional confidence and the firm contour line announce a new direction. The Torii school, traditionally identified with kabuki signboards and actor prints, here turns its disciplined draftsmanship to literary subject matter — evidence of how Kiyonaga broadened the studio's repertoire while preparing the way for the full bijin-ga florescence of the early 1780s. The Art Institute of Chicago preserves an impression of this design among its holdings of Kiyonaga's early mitate-bijin work.