Passengers in a Ferry Boat on the Sumida River1784
Torii Kiyonaga designed this in 1784, aged 32. It is now at the Cleveland Museum of Art. More about this work
About this work
Torii Kiyonaga designed this in 1784, aged 32. It is now at the Cleveland Museum of Art.
How it was made
- Colour woodblock print
- In Japan these were a team effort. The artist drew the design, a carver cut it into cherry-wood blocks, one block for each colour, and a printer brushed on the pigment and rubbed each sheet by hand. Full-colour prints of this kind were called nishiki-e, “brocade pictures”, from the 1760s on.
Torii Kiyonaga
Japanese, 1752–1815
Kiyonaga trained with Torii Kiyomitsu and in 1785 became head of the Torii line, the hereditary designers of kabuki theatre signboards and posters. He is best known for the 1780s, when his tall, statuesque women, set in realistic outdoor scenes and often spread across diptychs and triptychs, defined the ideal of beauty in Edo. In the 1790s he largely turned from fashionable subjects to his duties for the theatre.
Written by Ochre Editions.
Ukiyo-e
Japanese woodblock prints of the floating world: actors, courtesans, landscapes and the sea.
Rights and the museum’s record
Public domain. The Cleveland Museum of Art has dedicated this image to the public domain under CC0, so anyone may copy, adapt and use it, for any purpose, without asking. Our prints and files are reproductions made from the museum’s image; the museum doesn’t endorse them.
- Object number
- 1956.750
- Credit
- Courtesy of the Cleveland Museum of Art
- Type
- Department
- Japanese Art
- Licence
- CC0 1.0 Universal
- Museum record
- See it on the museum’s site
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