Procession of Wrestlers for a Fundraising Match (Kanjin ozumo dohyo-iri no zu)

This early 1850s ōban-format color woodblock print triptych, held by the Art Institute of Chicago (reference number 1942.542, gift of Mrs. O. J. Friedman), is one of Utagawa Yoshimune's most ambitious surviving compositions and a vivid record of the world of mid-nineteenth-century Edo sumo. Its full title, "Kanjin ōzumō dohyō-iri no zu" (Procession of Wrestlers for a Fundraising Match), refers to the ceremonial dohyō-iri or ring-entering procession that opened each day of a kanjin ōzumō — a tournament held to raise funds for the construction or repair of a temple, shrine, or other public building. Kanjin tournaments were one of the few legally sanctioned commercial sumo events in the Edo period and one of the great popular spectacles of the city; their opening processions, in which the senior wrestlers entered the ring wearing elaborate ceremonial keshō-mawashi aprons embroidered with the marks of their patrons, were intensely fashionable subjects for prints. Yoshimune's triptych spreads the procession across three ōban sheets, allowing him to depict a long file of wrestlers with the lavish costume detail and dynamic figural composition that he had absorbed from his teacher Kuniyoshi. The triptych belongs to the active phase of Yoshimune's career in the early 1850s, when sumo-e and musha-e were among the most commercial print subjects in Edo. It is preserved in the Art Institute of Chicago's substantial holdings of Japanese woodblock prints and is currently in the public domain.