Young Man and Woman with a Kite

A c. 1770s [hashira-e](/glossary/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](/glossary/oban) perspective prints with which he is most commonly identified.