Twelve Views of Tokyo: Iris Field, Shin-Yoshiwara Licensed Quarter
東京十二景 新吉原遊郭 菖蒲園
- Date:
- early 1880s
- Medium:
- Color woodblock print; oban triptych
- Source:
- Edo-Tokyo Museum
東京十二景 新吉原遊郭 菖蒲園
Iris Field, Shin-Yoshiwara Licensed Quarter is a sheet from Toyohara Chikayoshi's Twelve Views of Tokyo (Tōkyō jūni kei), a topographical-and-seasonal series produced in the early-to-mid 1880s and now preserved in the Edo-Tokyo Museum as one of four sheets from the set in that collection. The print depicts the seasonal blooming of irises in the marshy precincts adjacent to the Shin-Yoshiwara licensed quarter, the rebuilt pleasure district that occupied the same northeastern Tokyo location as the Edo-period Yoshiwara following the great fire of 1855 and the regulatory reorganizations of the early Meiji decades. Chikayoshi compresses two registers of imagery into a single composition: the foreground belongs to the iris field itself, where the long bladed leaves and characteristic purple-and-white blossoms are picked out in heavy keyblock outline and saturated 1880s reds and purples, while the upper register shows the licensed quarter's distinctive low silhouette of brothel facades, gateways, and the pedestrians moving through its streets. The print exemplifies the late Utagawa school topographical mode that Kunichika and his pupils applied to the new Meiji capital: a hybrid of traditional famous-place (meisho) imagery and the contemporary fashion plate, in which the seasonal motif and the licensed quarter exist on the same sheet without narrative tension. Chikayoshi's hand is recognizable in the slightly softer drawing of the figures and the relatively reserved use of pigment compared to Kunichika's denser compositions of the same years, and the Twelve Views set as a whole offers one of the most coherent surviving bodies of her topographical work.
東京十二景 染井
early 1880s
Color woodblock print; oban triptych
東京十二景 巣鴨の菊
early 1880s
Color woodblock print; oban triptych
上野桜遊覧之図
early 1880s
Color woodblock print; oban triptych; published by Asano Eizo
忠臣蔵
1880s
Color woodblock print; oban triptych
Twelve Views of Tokyo: Iris Field, Shin-Yoshiwara Licensed Quarter (東京十二景 新吉原遊郭 菖蒲園) was created by Toyohara Chikayoshi (豊原周美) in early 1880s.
Twelve Views of Tokyo: Iris Field, Shin-Yoshiwara Licensed Quarter depicts birds & flowers.
