Yumoto, from the series "Seven Famous Hot Springs of Hakone (Hakone shichito meisho)"

Yumoto, from the series Seven Famous Hot Springs of Hakone (Hakone shichito meisho), is an early color woodblock print designed by Torii Kiyonaga around 1775. Yumoto, the first of the seven Hakone spa villages encountered by travelers leaving Edo along the Tōkaidō, was already famous in the Edo period for its mineral baths and inns, and the series gave Kiyonaga an excuse to combine landscape with the elegant figures that would soon define his Edo bijin-ga practice. As a young designer working within the Torii school—an Edo lineage long associated with kabuki signboards and theatrical prints—Kiyonaga was here testing the more genteel meisho-e tradition of celebrated places, a category usually claimed by Suzuki Harunobu and his followers. The Art Institute of Chicago, which holds this impression, identifies the sheet as part of Kiyonaga's formative experimentation with multi-block color printing in the years just before his mature bijin-ga style emerged. The composition typically places one or two visitors against an abbreviated suggestion of mountain scenery, hot-spring buildings, or a river crossing, anchoring the location through a poem cartouche and the series and place names at the top. Color is delicate and tonally close, reflecting the chūban format's polite, gift-print register rather than the bolder palette of his later large sheets. For modern viewers, the print documents how Edo travelers imagined Hakone as a polished cultural destination as much as a therapeutic resort, and it offers an early glimpse of Kiyonaga's lifelong interest in placing carefully observed figures within named, recognizable settings.