Travelers on the Tokaido

This color woodblock print at the Art Institute of Chicago presents two sheets of a triptych depicting travelers on the Tokaido, the great coastal highway connecting Edo to Kyoto. The Tokaido, with its fifty-three stations stretching some five hundred kilometers, was the most heavily traveled road in Tokugawa Japan and the spine of the commercial and cultural exchange between the eastern and western halves of the country. Long before Hiroshige's celebrated nineteenth-century series, the Tokaido was already a major ukiyo-e subject, and Shuncho's contribution belongs to the earlier Tenmei-era engagement with the highway as a setting for fashionable travelers rather than an exhaustive station-by-station survey. The Art Institute holds two sheets of what was originally a triptych, suggesting that the missing sheet would have completed a panoramic horizontal composition. Shuncho's treatment foregrounds the women of the procession, characteristic of his integration of figure observation with topographic specificity.