Young Woman with Symbols of the First Dream of the New Year

Young Woman with Symbols of the First Dream of the New Year is a 1777 woodblock print by Torii Kiyonaga, the fourth-generation head of the Torii school and a defining figure of Edo bijin-ga in the late eighteenth century. The print draws on the popular hatsuyume tradition, the belief that the first dream of the new year carried prognostic power and that auspicious motifs slipped under one's pillow on the second night of the first month would invite good fortune. The most fortunate sequence of dream imagery was the famous Ichi-Fuji, ni-taka, san-nasubi: Mount Fuji first, a hawk second, and eggplants third. Kiyonaga organizes his composition around a fashionable young woman accompanied or surrounded by some combination of these emblems, framing her as the embodiment of Edo new-year sentiment. The figure exemplifies the artist's emerging idealized beauty, dressed in a celebratory kimono whose patterns are printed in clear, restrained colors that signal seasonal renewal. As a Torii school designer, Kiyonaga had been trained in the heritage of bold theatrical drawing, and traces of that confidence appear in the firmly drawn keyblock outlines, even as his sensibility moves toward the slender refinement that characterizes Edo bijin-ga of his generation. The print is preserved at the Art Institute of Chicago, whose Kiyonaga holdings document the artist's calendar and seasonal output. It exemplifies how Edo printmakers turned shared customs and proverbial dream-images into vehicles for fashion-conscious portraits of contemporary women.