Young woman holding poem slip

A small shikishiban-format surimono showing a young woman holding a poem slip (tanzaku), one of countless examples of Toyohiro's work for the poetry-circle commissions that were the most prestigious and lucrative private patronage of his era. Surimono were privately printed for distribution among poets at the New Year and on other ceremonial occasions, and they typically combined deluxe printing techniques (mica, metallic pigments, blind embossing) with carefully matched verse and image. Toyohiro's bijin-ga sensibility, with its quiet poses and elongated proportions, was particularly suited to the genre, where vulgarity would have been unwelcome and refinement was rewarded. The poem slip itself, a vehicle for the patron's contributed verse, marks this sheet as part of a literary social ritual. Now held by the Art Institute of Chicago, the print is representative of the surimono mode that occupied much of Toyohiro's most discriminating work.