Cherry blossoms at Ueno, wrapper for the series "One Hundred Views of the Eastern Capital (Toto hyakkei)"

Cherry Blossoms at Ueno is the printed wrapper, or fukuro, designed by Katsushika Hokusai for the series One Hundred Views of the Eastern Capital (Toto hyakkei), an ambitious survey of Edo that he intended to produce around 1830. Wrappers like this functioned as covers that held complete sets of prints together for sale, but they were themselves designed images and are often collected today as independent works. Hokusai's wrapper shows a famous Ueno scene - the celebrated cherry blossoms of Kan'eiji temple and Shinobazu Pond - in a tall composition framed for the title and publisher's information. As a piece of Edo ukiyo-e it documents both Hokusai's marketing ingenuity and his ability to design eloquently within a constrained graphic format. The Art Institute of Chicago holds the wrapper in its collection. While the full Toto hyakkei series was apparently never completed in the form Hokusai imagined, the wrapper itself survives as a self-sufficient ukiyo-e print, a vivid celebration of Ueno's cherry blossoms and of Edo as a place worth a hundred views. For collectors of Hokusai's late work, it occupies a fascinating spot in his catalogue: a piece of publishing ephemera that nonetheless reveals the same compositional ambition and graphic richness as his more famous landscape sheets, and which testifies to the central role that cherry-blossom culture played in defining the visual identity of the eastern capital.