Sannō Festival Procession (Sannō-sama gosairei zu), No. 1

This 1858 woodblock print by Utagawa Kunisato, held by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (accession MFA sc218902), is the first sheet in a numbered series titled Sannō-sama gosairei zu (Sannō Festival Procession). The Sannō Matsuri at Hie Shrine was one of the three great Edo festivals (sannō Edo no san-dai-matsuri), held biennially in the sixth lunar month with a massive ceremonial procession of mikoshi (portable shrines), decorative floats, mounted figures, costumed retainers, and musical accompaniment that wound its way through the central Edo wards and reached the precincts of Edo Castle, where the shōgun and his immediate court could view the procession from a privileged vantage. Kunisato's series belongs to the documentary-festival print tradition that had been a major category of Edo print production since the eighteenth century, and his 1858 treatment captures the procession in the multi-sheet numbered format that allowed buyers to follow the sequence of the parade as a coherent narrative. The first print establishes the opening of the procession and sets the documentary register for the series. The MFA preserves at least six numbered prints from the series (sc218902 through sc218907), plus additional duplicate impressions, and the museum's open-access digital program makes the full sequence available for study as one of the most complete surviving documentary records of an Edo Sannō Festival procession from the late Ansei era, immediately before the political upheavals that would close the Edo period.