Ushi-no-gozen, from the series "Famous Places of Edo (Edo meisho)"

Ushi-no-gozen, from the series Famous Places of Edo (Edo meisho), is a 1778 woodblock print by Torii Kiyonaga, the Torii school master who reoriented Edo bijin-ga toward the urban landscape of the city. Ushi-no-gozen, today's Ushijima shrine, stood on the eastern bank of the Sumida River and was famous for its Ox stone and its association with the venerable cult of the ox-headed Gozu Tenno; pilgrims and pleasure-seekers visited the shrine and its surroundings, particularly in good weather. Kiyonaga frames the place through the figures of fashionable contemporary women, the shrine and its precincts serving less as a topographical record than as a setting that connects each Edo meisho with the visual world of Edo bijin-ga. The composition unfolds in the now-familiar Kiyonaga manner: tall, calmly disposed figures, kimono patterns rendered with the controlled palette of late-1770s nishiki-e, and a sense of place that emerges from a few well-chosen elements of architecture or landscape rather than detailed topographical drawing. The result places the Famous Places series within the Torii school's broader engagement with Edo as both stage and subject. The print is preserved at the Art Institute of Chicago, where it forms part of a Kiyonaga holding that allows comparison between his named-place series and his more purely figural works. It demonstrates how, in the hands of an artist trained in the Torii school's theatrical traditions, the meisho print could become an extension of bijin-ga rather than a strict landscape genre.