Young Man and Woman with a Kite

A c. 1770s hashira-e (pillar print) at the Art Institute of Chicago, this design uses the narrow, tall format developed for hanging on the wooden pillars of Edo townhouses to pair a young man and woman with a kite. The hashira-e format demanded ingenious composition: figures had to be stacked, twisted, or made to lean across one another to occupy a space roughly six times taller than wide, and the best designers of pillar prints turned this constraint into a virtue. Toyoharu has used the New Year kite-flying motif, with its connotations of youthful play and seasonal renewal, as the pretext for a vertically organised double-figure design. The print belongs alongside contemporaneous hashira-e by Suzuki Harunobu and Isoda Koryusai and confirms Toyoharu's full participation in the specialised formats of the Edo market, not only in the standard oban perspective prints with which he is most commonly identified.