April;Flwer Viewing Boat

April — Flower Viewing Boat (hanami-bune) depicts the pleasure boats that carried parties of revelers along the rivers and canals under the cherry blossoms, one of the most festive and socially important activities of the Japanese spring. The flower-viewing boat, with its passengers in their best spring clothing, musicians, food and sake, and the falling petals of the sakura overhead, provided Mori with a subject of considerable compositional richness. The scene belonged to the tradition of seasonal genre subjects in Japanese print art, updated through his own lively folk-art sensibility.