Yotsubashi Bridge, from the series One Hundred Views of Osaka (Naniwa hyakkei no uchi)

This 1869-70 Museum of Fine Arts Boston print by Hasegawa Sadanobu I belongs to the series Naniwa hyakkei no uchi (One Hundred Views of Osaka), the major topographical landscape series that Sadanobu produced in the early Meiji years to chronicle his native city's famous places. The Yotsubashi Bridge sheet documents one of Osaka's most distinctive urban landmarks — a complex of four bridges crossing the intersection of the Saigo and Nishi-Yokobori canals in central Osaka, a celebrated commercial nexus of the city. The series followed the model of Hiroshige's earlier Edo and Tokaido landscape series, providing for Osaka's residents and visitors a comparable visual chronicle of their own urban environment. The composition combines the precise architectural rendering that distinguished mid-nineteenth-century landscape printing with attention to the urban activity — boats, pedestrians, commercial buildings — that defined Osaka as Japan's leading mercantile city. The MFA's holding situates Sadanobu I's landscape achievement within a long history of Boston's Japanese print collecting.