Page 289 - Edo: Art in Japan, 1615–1868

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Ando Hiroshige (1797 -1858) Ando Hiroshige (1797 -1858) Ando Hiroshige (1797 -1858)
Hatsune Riding Grounds, from Plum Garden at Kameido, from Fireworks over Ryôgoku Bridge, from
One Hundred Famous Views of Edo One Hundred Famous Views of Edo One Hundred Famous Views of Edo
1856 1856 1856
Color woodblock print Color woodblock print Color woodblock print
3
7
3
7
7
3
34 x 22.5 (i3 /s x 8 /s) 34 x 22.5 (i3 /sx 8 /s) 34 x 22.5 (i3 /sx 8 /s)
Brooklyn Museum of Art Collection Brooklyn Museum of Art Collection Brooklyn Museum of Art Collection
Illustrated page 266
• This lyrical scene shows the appro- • One Hundred Famous Views of Edo
priation of a military space by Edo's is Hiroshige's composite, subjective
mercantile element. The Hatsune rid- portrait of a great city. Completed in • Famous bridges, a traditional theme
288 in Japanese art, are believed to pos-
ing grounds were once a place used 1856, just two years before the artist sess powerful liminal, poetic, and
for the practice of horsemanship by died, this monumental work was
the shogun's retainers, but by the reissued many times with modifica- strategic properties. And riverboat
summer's
on a muggy
entertainment
late Edo period the location had fallen tions. It features near views and far, night was popular all over Asia. The
into disuse — a sad reminder of the lofty personages and commoners,
redundancy and inutility of the mili- traditional scenes and innovative two themes converge here in what
was a common summer
sight in nine-
tary class. After equestrian drills were ones — its complexity defies easy teenth-century Edo: lavish fireworks
discontinued there, neighboring dyers characterization. Perhaps inspired by
found the grounds a convenient open Katsushika Hokusai's One Hundred displays, which were thought to
make one
feel cool (in fact, a thriving
space to plant stakes from which to Views of Fuji, Hiroshige set himself a fireworks industry sprang up in Edo).
dry their cloth. challenge and rose to it unflinchingly.
We can practically hear the raucous
By now viewers should be familiar Famous views of Edo first appeared music coming from the entertain-
with Ando Hiroshige's beloved device on large-scale screen paintings as ment boats, the laughter of drunken
of showing small, distant forms adaptations of the sixteenth-century revelers, the whistle of the ascending
beyond magnified forms in the fore- screens showing the traditional sights rockets — followed by silence and
ground. More unusual, however, are of Kyoto. When the Tokugawa estab- then the boom as they explode.
the special textural effects unique to lished the "Eastern Capital," they pur-
the woodblock medium: the perfectly posely copied many of Kyoto's major The Ryôgoku Bridge spanning the
most
Sumida River was
one
of Edo's
placed heart of the woodblock just landmarks in the new city to lend famous and frequently depicted
off center in the sky between the it dignity and authority befitting the
willows, and the blind printing of the shogunal seat. Printed guidebooks bridges. Kitagawa Utamaro (1753 -
1806), for example, loved to portray
paper with an impression taken from further established the canon of innu- beauties lined up on its graceful
a piece of silk, seen in the white strip merable famous places, or meisho.
of cloth. The budding willows set the Trees have been designated meisho spans. But to render the complicated
of fireworks
visual phenomenon
season as early spring, and the peace- throughout Japanese history — one flashing in a night sky required a
ful, crepuscular mood of evening is
enhanced by the men, women, and thinks immediately of the Karasaki conceptual leap. Artists before
Hiroshige, namely Yosa Buson (1716-
Pine, which Hiroshige depicted in
children going about their business or his Eight Views of Ômi — but rarely 1783), had experimented with the
gossiping; a group of puppies echoes has there been a portrait of such effects of reflected light in a night
this last activity.
an uncommon botanical specimen. scene. What Hiroshige endeavored to
The artist signed this series of prints In a peculiar growth pattern, the make here — a permanent record of
"Ichiryusai Hiroshige." MT branches of the Sleeping Dragon Plum a fleeting pyrotechnic experience —
grew downward and rerooted them- is very much in keeping with the
selves, propagating over an area Edo spirit of empiricism, the desire to
some fifty feet square. Hiroshige has capture on paper transitory effects
rendered the apparently timeless that can be but momentarily per-
tree as an enormous foreground form, ceived by the eye. Other printmakers
while, appropriately, those viewing had tried it before, but none achieved
the blossoms — mere humans who the success of the present print. MT
come and go — are tiny background
figures. MT