Second Illustration of Calligraphy and Painting Party on the Upper Floor of the Manpachiro Restaurant (Manpachiro jo shoga kaiseki no zu, onajiku sono ni)

This 1827 print, "Second Illustration of Calligraphy and Painting Party on the Upper Floor of the Manpachirō Restaurant," documents a real Edo cultural event: a shoga-kaiseki, or gathering at which artists, calligraphers, poets, and patrons produced work and exchanged criticism over food and drink. The Manpachirō was a known Edo restaurant whose upper floor hosted such gatherings, and prints commemorating these events functioned partly as social journalism, partly as advertising for the establishment, and partly as portrait-roll of the cultural figures present. As one of the rising Utagawa-school designers of the late 1820s, Utagawa Kunisada was a natural choice to record the second of these Manpachirō gatherings; the title's "onajiku sono ni" ("likewise, number two") indicates the print was paired with at least one earlier sheet. The Art Institute of Chicago preserves the impression (artwork 81298). The work is a window into the dense interpenetration of food, sociability, and visual culture in Edo's middle Bunsei years, when Edo ukiyo-e served as both record and amplifier of the city's literary and artistic networks. Kunisada's later identity as Toyokuni III still lay ahead, but the design already shows his command of group composition.