The Tanabata Festival, from the 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
The Tanabata Festival, from the series Precious Children's Games of the Five Festivals (Kodakara gosetsu asobi), recorded by the Art Institute of Chicago with a date of 1796, comes from a late Torii Kiyonaga series devoted to the five annual gosekku observed by Edo families: New Year, Girls' Day, Boys' Day, Tanabata, and the Chrysanthemum Festival. Tanabata, celebrated on the seventh day of the seventh month, commemorates the once-yearly meeting of the Cowherd and Weaver Maid stars across the Milky Way; households wrote wishes on paper strips (tanzaku) and tied them to bamboo poles set up in courtyards and on rooftops. Kiyonaga's design pairs adults and children around the festive bamboo, observing the children's games and the writing of wishes that give the series its title. By the mid-1790s Kiyonaga had begun to cede the field of fashionable bijin-ga to Utamaro and Eishi, but he retained a particular authority over family and seasonal subjects, where his measured compositions and tall, dignified figures suited the gentle pace of domestic ritual. The Torii school's clarity of outline and broad areas of flat colour are well adapted to the visual punctuation of tanzaku, banners and the slender bamboo itself. The Art Institute holds this print as part of its survey of his late career. For collectors, leaves from Kodakara gosetsu asobi are valuable for showing how Edo bijin-ga moved beyond the pleasure quarter into the domestic calendar that any Edo townsman would have recognised as his own.
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 Tanabata Festival, from the 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 Tanabata Festival, from the from the series "Precious Children's Games of the Five Festivals (Kodakara gosetsu asobi)" depicts children.
