Two Women Viewing Cherry Blossoms

Two Women Viewing Cherry Blossoms, a 1775 design by Torii Kiyonaga, is among the early bijin-ga that Kiyonaga produced as he assumed his place within the Torii school. Two fashionably dressed townswomen stand beneath a flowering cherry, the slighter proportions and the soft, somewhat reticent rendering of contour reflecting the strong influence of Suzuki Harunobu and Kitao Shigemasa on Kiyonaga's first decade of design work. The hanami subject — the spring outing to view cherry blossoms — was one of Edo's most reliably popular seasonal themes, and Kiyonaga returned to it repeatedly across his career; comparing this 1775 sheet with the mid-1780s Yoshiwara hanami compositions shows how dramatically he would later enlarge and elongate the bijin form. The Torii school at this date remained best known for its kabuki billboards and actor prints, and Kiyonaga's bijin-ga represent the early stages of the studio's pivot toward depictions of women and Edo customs that he would consolidate after taking over school leadership from Torii Kiyomitsu. The Art Institute of Chicago records this early hanami design among its earliest Kiyonaga holdings, where it documents the formative moment of the artist's engagement with the Edo bijin-ga tradition.