Festival Floats, No. 4 from a series

This 1857 woodblock print by Utagawa Kunisato, held by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (accession MFA sc138824), is the fourth sheet from a series depicting festival floats, showing the elaborate dashi (festival floats) that featured in the major Edo civic festivals of the mid-nineteenth century. The dashi were tall multi-tier wheeled platforms decorated with figural carvings, lanterns, banners, and seasonal motifs, and they were pulled through the streets during festivals as the centerpieces of ward-based competitive parades. Each Edo ward maintained its own dashi, and the festival processions featured the floats in numbered sequence as a competitive display of ward identity and craft skill. Kunisato's numbered series belongs to the documentary-festival print tradition that he worked across the late 1850s, and the No. 4 designation indicates a multi-print series capturing successive floats across the procession in a format that mirrors the Sannō Festival series of the following year. The 1857 date places the print within Kunisato's documented Ansei-era documentary output, and the MFA's preservation of the sheet and open-access digitization make it visible as a primary source for late-Edo festival visual culture. The print is one of several Kunisato festival compositions in the MFA collection that together document the artist's particular interest in the ceremonial parades and competitive ward-based displays that animated Edo civic life in the years immediately before the Meiji Restoration.