Forgetting Filial Piety
Torii Kiyonaga Japanese
Not on view
A rainy morning outside the licensed pleasure quarters further delays a disheveled young man who nonchalantly brushes his teeth while his companion and her maids look on with barely concealed impatience. The inscription, "Forget not your parents' love; respect the virtue of filial piety," is in satiric contrast to the scene, which in other circumstances might indeed reflect a family at its morning routine.
Torii Kiyonaga, the last influential artist of the Torii school, painted graceful, stylish figures in the late eighteenth century.