Yushima from the series Scenes of Ten Teahouses (Chamise jikkei)

Yushima, from the series Scenes of Ten Teahouses (Chamise jikkei), is a 1778 woodblock print by Torii Kiyonaga, the leading Torii school designer of late eighteenth-century Edo bijin-ga. The series surveys ten celebrated teahouses across the city of Edo, each sheet given over to a particular establishment and its waitresses. Yushima, on the rising ground near Yushima Tenjin shrine in the northeast of the city, was renowned for its plum blossoms in early spring and for the popular teahouses that clustered along the slopes leading up to the shrine precinct, where pilgrims, scholars, and pleasure-seekers paused for refreshment. Kiyonaga frames the location through fashionable young women - presumably teahouse waitresses and patrons - dressed in seasonally appropriate kimono and gathered around a setting that invokes the open-air, slightly elevated character of the Yushima approach. The figures are arranged with the deliberation typical of his maturing style: tall, well-proportioned, set into the picture plane with the spatial coherence that distinguishes his work from the more flattened compositions of earlier bijin-ga. Building on his Torii school training, Kiyonaga uses crisp, sustained outlines and a measured nishiki-e palette to integrate figure and place. The print is preserved at the Art Institute of Chicago, whose Kiyonaga holdings include several sheets from the Chamise jikkei series. It exemplifies the late-Edo taste for prints that map the city through its sites of urban pleasure.