Street Scene in the New Year Season

A [surimono](/glossary/surimono) by Utagawa Kuninao depicting a street scene in the New Year season, dated 1814 and held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. New Year - the first day of the lunar year - was the most consequential holiday in the Edo cultural calendar, and the seasonal observances built into the days surrounding it (the visiting of family, the elaborate formal dress, the decoration of doorways with kadomatsu pine-and-bamboo arrangements, the symbolic first walks and first poems of the year) supplied surimono designers with a steady stream of imagery that suited the surimono format's normal association with New Year distribution by poetry clubs. The street-scene composition - with multiple figures in seasonal costume against a background of Edo townhouse architecture - is a more ambitious multi-figure design than the typical single-figure surimono and prefigures the later landscape-genre integration that Hiroshige and Kuniyoshi would bring to commercial single-sheet prints in the 1830s. Kuninao at this date was still in his teens and working in the Utagawa-school manner he had learned under Toyokuni I, but the careful architectural drawing of the street setting suggests the attention to topographical detail that he would intensify after his subsequent association with Hokusai in the early 1820s. The Met's surimono holdings constitute one of the most substantial Edo-period surimono collections outside Japan.