戦後の復興が進み、東京の街並みが姿を変える中、自身にとっての「心のふるさと」である明治20年頃の東京の下町の暮らしを追想して描いた作品です。海に近い築地辺りの朝から始まり、風鈴売りが涼む昼、そして八丁堀界隈の夕で終わる夏の一日を画巻に表しました。朝は新聞売りの腰につけた鈴、昼は風鈴、夕は辻占売りの少女の姿など、音を想像させる要素が画面の中に描かれており、それらの音が人々の話し声や生活の音とともに画面から聞こえて来るようです。
清方が提唱した「卓上芸術」を代表する作品であり、また、清方芸術の特徴である、かつての東京の下町の、市井の人々の営みへの愛惜を主題にした作品です。

Chōseki Ankyo (Daily Life of the Common People in Downtown of the Meiji Period)
(First exhibited at the 4th Nitten (Japan Fine Arts Exhibition))

As the postwar recovery picked up and the streets of Tokyo started to change, Kiyokata painted this series where he recollected scenes from the Tokyo shitamachi area as it was in the late 1880s to the late 1890s, where Kiyokata saw as his “spiritual home.” The hand scroll represents the course of a summer’s day, starting with scenes at Tsukiji by the sea in the morning, a seller of wind chimes cooling off at midday, and ending with an evening in the Hatchōbori neighborhood. Kiyokata has incorporated elements that allude to sounds such as the bells worn by newspaper sellers in the morning, the wind chimes at midday, or the figure of a young girl selling slips of paper with fortune-telling messages in the evening. Together with the voices of conversations and the noises of daily life, these sounds seem to drift out of the painting.
Chōseki Ankyo is an example of the “tabletop art” that Kiyokata advocated. The theme of nostalgia for how people used to occupy themselves in Tokyo’s shitamachi neighborhood as it once was is also characteristic of Kiyokata’s art.