Artist: Torii Kiyonaga (Japanese, 1752-1815)
Title: Mid-Autumn (Naka no Aki)
Series: Fashionable Series from the Twelve Months (Fūryū jūni kikō)
Date: 1779
Medium: Woodblock print (nishiki-e); ink and color on paper
Gift of Dr. Cecilia Segawa Seigle

Here, two geisha are seated on an open veranda on a mid-autumn day. On the left, a geisha sits with her shamisen instrument as she looks at the moon, while her companion on the right stands looking down at her.

Torii Kiyonaga designed this print in about 1779. In the 1770s, Kiyonaga brought the Torii school back to the forefront of the print industry by emerging as one of the greatest new artists of his time. While his predecessors made many kabuki prints, Kiyonaga himself concentrated on the depiction of famous beauties.

Mid-Autumn is part of a series of twelve chuban-sized ukiyo-e prints titled “Fashionable Scenes from the Twelve Months.” A handful of prints from this series exist in known public and private collections. Copies of the Second Month, Fourth Month, and Ninth Month belong to the Museum of Fine Arts Boston. Despite the fact that each of them belongs to this series of twelve months, there is no known cohesive collection of the series altogether. Mid-autumn is an extremely rare print in excellent condition.

In the most up to date study of the works of Kiyonaga, produced by the Chiba City Museum of Art in 2007, Mid-Autumn was not found in any of the major public or private collections world-wide. There is no known collection in which this print exists, until now.

Selected Readings:
A Catalogue of the Works of Torii Kiyonaga. Chiba: Chiba City Art Museum, 2007.

Julie Nelson Davis. Partners in Print: Artistic Collaboration and the Ukiyo-e Market. Honolulu: U of Hawai’i, 2015.

Chie Hirano. Kiyonaga: A Study of His Life and Works, with a Portfolio of Plates in Color and Collotype. Cambridge, MA: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, by the Harvard UP, 1939.

Posted by Maddie Smoot
May 1, 2016
(updated April 14, 2018)