Courtesan with Flower Cart, from the series "Famous Flowers in Three Capitals (Santo meisho no hana)"

A surimono in the Art Institute of Chicago from Shigenobu's series Famous Flowers in Three Capitals (Santo meisho no hana), this design pairs a courtesan with a hanaguruma (flower cart) — the elaborate wheeled flower-arrangement carts that Yoshiwara and other licensed-quarter courtesans pushed in seasonal processions and parades. The 'three capitals' of the series title are Edo, Kyoto, and Osaka, and the sequence as a whole treats famous flower-associated subjects across the three urban centers, with each print folding a city-specific identity into the named beauty and the three-city framework giving the series a panoramic geographic logic of the kind that kyōka-circle publishers favored. The museum's attribution line — 'Yanagawa Shigenobu I (Rinsai)' — preserves the alternate gō (Rinsai) under which Shigenobu sometimes signed his work. As a surimono the print would have carried kyōka in the upper register; the figure of the courtesan with her cart anchors the composition with the long vertical sweep of kimono that surimono designers favored for their narrow vertical formats.