Kawabiraki

A woodblock print in ink and color on paper at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, dated by the Met to about 1805, depicting the Kawabiraki, or 'River Opening,' the famous early-summer festival held on the Sumida River at Ryogoku Bridge to mark the start of the summer pleasure-boating and fireworks season. The kawabiraki was one of the great public spectacles of late-Edo civic life, with boats packed with patrons, food and sake stalls, music, and the elaborate fireworks displays presented by the Tamaya and Kagiya firework houses. Toyoharu's print belongs to his later production: by the 1790s and 1800s he had become a senior figure in the Edo art world and was working as much in painting as in print, but he continued to design occasional prints of fashionable festival subjects. The composition is an heir of his earlier perspective experiments, with the river, the bridge, and the lines of boats organised in receding orthogonals, but it now serves a celebratory pleasure-quarter subject of the kind that Hiroshige and his Utagawa-school contemporaries would later make a staple of nineteenth-century Edo meisho-e.